


Cut To The Feeling

by ouiser_boudreaux



Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Anxiety, Depression, Drinking, Drinking to Cope, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Happy Ending, I promise this is a romcom they just have a lot to work through, Idiots in Love, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Light Bondage, Light Dom/sub, Medicinal Drug Use, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recreational Drug Use, Sex first feelings later, Weddings, disaster bisexuals in deep denial, the disaster bisexual romcom of my dreams basically, tropes and cliches ahead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:08:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 52,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28038945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ouiser_boudreaux/pseuds/ouiser_boudreaux
Summary: When Portia asks Vissenta to be her best man in her wedding to Nadia, Vissenta immediately accepts. For one thing, Portia has been one of her best friends since college. For another, any party thrown by the Satrinavas is guaranteed to have the best food, the best booze, and the best chances at getting laid.What Vissenta didn't count on was Portia's brother Julian showing up looking like an entire snack.--Listen, this is the modern AU romcom that no one asked for and yet I wanted to serve anyway.
Relationships: Julian Devorak/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 32
Kudos: 72





	1. Dearly Beloved, We Are Gathered Here Today To Get Through This Thing Called Life

After over a decade of friendship, Vissenta thought she’d seen all the varying moods of Portia Devorak. There was her default cheerfulness, her angry crying, her sad crying, her relieved crying…

Lots of crying, actually.

But until today, Vissenta could confidently say that she’d never seen Portia fully Hulk out over a single thing. Mild annoyance? Sure. Righteous anger? Absolutely. But going fully nuclear after a phone call with Mazelinka? This one was new.

“I can’t believe they might miss this!” Portia collapsed on an obscenely large, obscenely plush sofa in the middle of her hotel room. She was furiously blinking away tears, trying desperately to not smear her makeup, and so instead had channeled all her tragic energy into wailing. She threw her phone across the room, where it landed with a soft, muted thud on the bed. “I told Ilya to get his flight booked weeks ago, but no, he couldn’t even be _bothered_ , and he had to come at the _last minute and he’s going to miss my wedding_ —“

“Hey now.” Vissenta perched on the edge of the sofa and rubbed her hand up and down Portia’s back as carefully as she could. “You’ve seen Mazelinka in traffic. They’ll be here with time to spare. I promise.” She flicked her eyes up at Natiqa. “What time is it, Tiqa?”

“Four o’clock,” Natiqa said, busy with opening up one of the bottles of Moët from the ice bucket.

“See? Four o’clock.” Vissenta reached into her tuxedo jacket pocket and pulled out a blue and gold monogrammed cloisonné pill box that fit neatly in her palm. She pressed the latch and took out a white pill and snapped it in half. “You’ve got two hours before you’re walking down that aisle, and even the nastiest rush hour airport traffic couldn’t keep Maz from seeing her beautiful Pasha get married.” She delicately pinched the half tablet of Xanax between her thumb and forefinger and held it up to Portia. “Now, Tiqa is going to make you a mimosa, you’re gonna knock this baby back, and you’re gonna have the greatest wedding this city has ever seen.”

Portia sniffed. “Promise?”

Vissenta flashed her a grin. “Why else did you make me your best man?”

With a watery smile, Portia took the half bar from Vissenta and gratefully accepted a flute of champagne from Natiqa. “I thought you said we were having mimosas?”

“Don’t have orange juice.” Natiqa handed a flute to Vissenta, then held up her own glass. “Bottoms up, babes.”

The three clinked a toast and drained the bubbly, and Portia took a deep breath. “I just can’t believe Ilya didn’t come sooner, is all.” She frowned and looked down at the glass in her hands, rolling it delicately back and forth between her henna’d palms. “I know he’s been… busy, and all, but…”

Vissenta plucked the Moët bottle from the table next to the sofa and refilled their glasses. “Julian’s always been like this, hasn’t he?” She took a slow, purposeful sip this time, rather than down the whole glass at once, and let the delicate bubbles dance across her tongue. God bless good champagne. “I mean, from what I remember of him five years ago, anyway.”

Portia’s lower lip started trembling again, but she straightened her spine and shook her head rather than cave in to the tears. “Not always.”

“Enough about Julian,” Natiqa interrupted. “How does it feel to be—“ She checked her watch. “—one hour and forty-five minutes away from being Mrs. Satrinava?”

Portia flushed deep pink and beamed. “God, it’s really happening, isn’t it?”

Vissenta sat back and smiled as she listened to Portia chatter excitedly about the ceremony, and the dinner menu, and the butterflies in her stomach, and the amazing honeymoon they had planned. Moments like this, when she and Portia and Natiqa were all together and running the gamut of emotions, felt just like their early twenties all over again. They might as well have been back at the shotgun house they shared back then, though it was hard to imagine living in a crowded, rundown house next to a college campus when they sat in such a decadently roomy, tastefully decorated hotel suite, decked out in their formal wedding party best.

Portia was resplendent in a light golden saree, and as she chattered on excitedly, Natiqa drifted closer to make small adjustments to her jewelry, her headwear, and her hair, never missing a beat in the conversation as she put Portia back to rights. Vissenta leaned back on the sofa, sipping her sparkling wine, grateful that Portia had relented on letting her wear a tux. Looking at Portia and Natiqa in their sarees, she was afraid she probably wouldn’t have been able to pull the whole look off quite as well.

She resisted the urge to pull out her phone and tap out a message to Asra. Knowing Asra, they’d immediately resort to FaceTime, and the last thing Vissenta needed was Portia seeing her fiancee, Nadia, by accident. Instead, she sipped her wine, and idly thought about taking the other half of the Xanax in her pill box as Portia talked. The sound of her name pulled her from her thoughts, though, and she blinked and looked back over to Portia and Natiqa. “Hm? What was that?”

“I said, the cafe’s been getting incredible press,” Portia beamed. “I know you and Tiqa are so proud.”

Vissenta shrugged. “It’s Selasi’s place, not ours,” she said, with an air of forced nonchalance. She reached for the Moët bottle again and noticed, with considerable disappointment, that it was already empty. “Should we open the other one?”

“I’d rather walk down the aisle than stumble, thanks,” Portia giggled. “Save it for later. Take it to your room.”

Vissenta rolled her eyes. “Because nothing says a good time like drinking a bottle of champagne alone in your hotel room.”

“Oh, please.” Natiqa brushed an imagined strand of her bright blue hair back into place and gave Vissenta a knowing smirk. “Dressed like that, you aren’t planning on being in there alone.”

Vissenta cocked an eyebrow and huffed her dark bangs from her eyes. “God willing, right?” Her phone began to buzz, and she started. When she took it from her pocket, she saw that it wasn’t a call, but an alarm going off. “Well, ladies, looks like it’s already time.”

She helped Portia stand, and for a moment, the three women all huddled together for an embrace. “We’re so happy for you, Pasha,” Vissenta said.

“Now let’s go show Vesuvia what a wedding’s supposed to look like,” Natiqa finished.

* * *

The ballroom for the reception was a gorgeous riot of color, in decor and in the wedding attendees’ dress alike. It was almost overwhelming, but at the center of the room were Portia and Nadia, now declared wife and wife, and looking gorgeously, blissfully happy, and with that focus point, Vissenta was able to breathe and smile and maybe, just maybe, relax.

She could still feel herself instinctively looking at all the behind the scenes work happening in plain sight around all of them. To most of the partygoers, the quiet, attentive people bearing trays of drinks and appetizers all around them were an afterthought, certainly _there_ but not _in the way_. As for herself, Vissenta kept catching the servers’ eyes and had to resist the urge to move through the crowd with them. She wasn’t working, as she had to remind herself every time she found her attention diverted by the swinging doors that led down the hall to the kitchen, or the bar, or any number of places that what was surely the best catering company in the city utilized to their full advantage to help make the wedding reception of the youngest Satrinava daughter a dinner that would be talked about for months to come.

Still, even with her best efforts to mingle, she drifted towards the outer fringes of the ballroom. Every once in a while, someone caught her arm to congratulate her on the fantastic opening week at Selasi’s, and she pasted on a grin through the pleasantries as well as she could. With every new stranger speaking to her, though, she found that she desperately wanted, more than anything else, a fucking cigarette.

Eventually she found her way to a set of doors that led to one of several patios and plunked down on a wrought-iron chair, her lowball glass of whiskey gone watery with all the ice having melted in the process of her slow, torturous procession along the ballroom perimeter. This patio was apparently the place to scratch the nicotine itch, and she leaned across the table where she sat to ask for a smoke.

The young woman eyed her appraisingly. “You’re Vissenta, aren’t you?”

Vissenta flashed a cheeky grin and winked. “The one and only.” Recognition was easier to stomach when it came from a pretty face. She took the other woman’s proffered cigarette and lighter, letting their fingers brush for a moment longer than necessary for the exchange, and took a long drag. She passed the lighter back, grazing the other woman’s hand once more, and cocked an eyebrow as she did her best French inhale. “And you are…?”

The other woman mirrored her expression. “The bartender you hit on at one in the morning last week. You… were pretty drunk.”

Vissenta’s face froze. _Shit_. “Oh. Right.” She felt her face burn, and she sat back in the chair as the other woman laughed and stood to go back inside. “Goddammit.” She stared into her whiskey glass. “Just you and me, huh?”

“Those things are gonna kill you,” Natiqa said from behind her.

“Promise?” Vissenta took another puff of the cigarette, then found that she’d rather lost her desire for it, and flicked the cherry out. “Come out here to lecture me, mom?”

Natiqa circled around to stand before Vissenta. She crossed her arms and cocked her head, that inscrutable smile of hers on her face. “There’s an entire party inside. A party full of happy people, including your two best friends in the whole wide world, and you’re out here doing…” She waved her hand. “Whatever this is.”

Vissenta stood. “Need some more to drink if I’m gonna handle a crowd that I’m not serving, I think.”

Natiqa shook her head. “You work too much.”

“I work just enough.” Vissenta took a long drink from her watery bourbon. “Oh, I never even saw. Did Mazelinka make it?”

Natiqa nodded. “Showed up just in time, apparently, in one piece and everything. I think she and Julian are in there congratulating Portia right now.” She looked once more at her watch. “Oh, and you have to give your toast in five minutes.”

“Oh for the fuck of shit.” Vissenta tossed back the rest of the drink and followed Natiqa inside. Together they wove around the dancing couples and food-laden tables, with Vissenta grabbing a glass of something fizzy and bright pink from a serving tray along the way, until they came to the brides’ table.

Just like Natiqa said, Mazelinka was there, hugging Portia and Nadia, beaming her gap-toothed smile all the while, and behind her stood…

Vissenta nearly dropped her drink.

The last time Vissenta saw Julian Devorak, he’d just been Portia’s older brother who grudgingly showed up for dinner every once in a while at Portia’s insistence. Back in those days, when he was deep in the throes of trying to double or even triple major while studying for the MCAT and doing God knows what else, he was… a mess. Tall, thin, awkward, surly, with dark circles under his dark circles and an unfortunate predilection for letting his hair grow almost as long as Portia’s.

Now…

Well, the under-eye circles were still pretty bad.

He still carried some of the awkwardness, as if he wasn’t sure what exactly to do with his body, but he’d actually grown into that body in the years since Vissenta had last seen him. Broad shoulders, the kind that make a dress shirt fit _just so_ , and he had the top few buttons of his own shirt undone enough to expose his collarbones, and then there were the legs for days, and she looked back up at his long, slim fingers, then back up to the hollow of this throat, his sharp jaw, and the tousle of auburn curls that flopped to one side in what might have been the most aggressively artfully-mussed haircut that Vissenta had ever seen in her life.

She wanted to grab a handful of it and _pull._

She started. This was not a normal reaction. She stared at her cocktail, wondering if maybe she’d had something to drink that she shouldn’t have, but she had barely touched this glass, and when she looked back up at Julian, she felt that weird flip-flop of her stomach again. Something was not right.

Then, he looked up and made eye contact with her.

Without a second to think, Vissenta did what she did best: raised one eyebrow, broadcasting her default state of being generally unimpressed by men. This was an effective strategy half the time, and from what she could remember of Julian, she assumed he’d be in that half of the male population who backed off before they even got started.

Instead, he raised an eyebrow back at her.

At this point, Natiqa noticed Vissenta’s newly-begun staring contest. She looked from Vissenta to Julian and back again, her smile growing by the second. “So you haven’t seen Julian yet today, have you?”

“Er.” Vissenta abruptly took a sip of the sweet, fizzy cocktail. “Not yet.”

“What a delightful reunion for everyone, then!” Natiqa waggled her eyebrows at Vissenta. “But first, you’ve got a toast to make.”

* * *

The evening progressed, as these sorts of evenings do, to the hotel bar. After the toasts (which Vissenta had only stumbled on once, when she looked up from her index card of notes to see Julian looking at her from a few tables down, and something about his curious stare made her nearly drop her microphone into Portia’s lap), after the dancing, after the brides had bid their farewell in a car that whisked them away to make a late flight to some romantic seaside destination, the dozens of guests who remained made their way to have just one more drink, and one more, and one more.

Vissenta ran into the bartender from earlier - _where did she tend bar? Was I really so blackout drunk last week? It must have been after the restaurant’s opening night_ \- and tried her best to invite the lovely lady to come up to her room to split the bottle of Moët that Portia had given her. It wasn’t her best effort, she’d admit, but she was still a bit… distracted.

Her gaze kept flicking over to a mop of red hair that stood out from above most of the other heads in the room.

The pretty bartender declined with a rueful smile and wandered off, and Vissenta parked herself at a high-top for two next to Natiqa. “Guess I will be drinking that champs alone after all, huh?”

Natiqa smiled into her coffee. Only she could drink coffee at midnight without worrying about her sleep suffering, it seemed. She gave Vissenta a serene look. “Or it could be that you’re hungry for a slice of ginger pound cake.”

Vissenta felt her face burning even as she scoffed. “The fuck are you talking about, Tiqa?”

Natiqa’s brows lifted so high they might have disappeared into her hairline. “Oh, you think I didn’t see you looking at Julian earlier?”

Vissenta did her best to roll her eyes. “Have you looked at his backside? Pound cake implies that I’d have something to sink my teeth into.” Once again she blushed red. “Not that, um, I want to sink my teeth into him.”

“I think you should give it a try,” Natiqa retorted. “You might like it.” Her eyes slid in Julian’s direction. “Although, you’re right. He’s a gingersnap at best.”

If Vissenta had a drink, she would have choked on it. As it was, she stood up and brushed at her lapels. “I think I need a drink to listen to anymore of this.”

As she strode toward the bar with a renewed sense of purpose, she heard Natiqa call to her retreating back. “Better get a whiskey and _ginger_ , hm?”

By the time Vissenta made it to the bar, she saw that Julian was sitting there, and decidedly alone. Decidedly drinking. Decidedly… _goddammit, he did look like a snack._

She could have smacked herself across the face. _Get a grip, Vis._ She flicked her braid back over her shoulder and straightened up as much as she could and took the last few strides to the bar.

Her voice did come out strong and sure, thank God, and she leaned on the back of the empty bar stool next to Julian. “Mind if I sit here?”

When Julian peered over his shoulder at her, she felt her stomach do that inconvenient fluttering thing again. He flashed her a crooked grin. “Only if you think you can stand being next to me.”

Vissenta perched on the stool with what she hoped was some semblance of cool, collected grace, and leaned one elbow against the bar. “How the hell have you been, Julian?” She was glad that he’d gone back to staring into his drink - whiskey, coincidentally, and Vissenta mentally cursed Natiqa’s bad jokes - because she couldn’t help but let her eyes wander over him. She looked at his profile, at the longer, asymmetrical curl of hair that fell over his right eye, and the way his lips curved upward even when he wasn’t smiling, and how he was the same Julian she’d known years ago and yet something _more_. Something sadder, almost, and she knew that the red flags were as bright as his hair, and they were _exactly_ the sort she liked to chase.

Julian finally looked askance at her and his mouth twisted into a wry smile. “Oh, continuing my grand tradition of being the Devorak family disappointment, how are you?”

This made Vissenta let out a bark of laughter, loud and ugly, and Julian looked up and over at her to fully meet her eyes. She hoped she wasn’t blushing too much, or at least that the low lighting of the bar disguised her flush. “Family disappointment, huh? Welcome to the club.” She nodded at his glass. “What’re you drinking?”

Julian picked up the glass by the rim and swirled the slowly-melting ice cubes around. “The cheapest bourbon they’ve got.”

“Oh, God.” Vissenta raised her chin at the bartender, who’d already begun to move their way when she sat down. “Two Blanton’s, neat.”

This made Julian lift a brow. “That’s, er…” He swallowed, then coughed politely. “Generous of you.”

Vissenta did her best at a casual shrug, just a slight roll up and down of her shoulder, and flashed him the same grin she’d tried on the cute woman who’d turned her down earlier. “Disappointments gotta stick together, yeah?”

She had the feeling that her grin was working on Julian much more effectively than it had on the lovely lady from the start of the night. He flushed the same color that Portia did, though his blush spread farther up his cheekbones to the tips of his ears. He ran a hand through his hair. “Can’t be much of a disappointment to buy Blanton’s.”

As if on cue, the two bourbons appeared before them. Vissenta lifted hers. “Well cheers to that, I guess.” She took a slow, savoring sip, noticing with approval that Julian did the same. “It’s all relative.”

Julian got that glum look in his eyes once again. “Well, I assume you aren’t the type to disappear for five years and almost show up late to your sister’s wedding.”

“Mm. You’d be surprised.” Vissenta sat down her glass. “So, other than being a disappointment, how have you been?”

Julian swirled his glass. “How long have you got?”

Vissenta could feel warmth spreading from her chest to her belly, and she wasn’t sure whether it was the bourbon or the easy smile of the man before her. “All night.”


	2. Want You In My Room

Julian had spotted Vissenta long before she ever spotted him. He wondered how long he could avoid her, but considering the fact that she was one of the two highest spots in the wedding party - his _sister’s wedding party_ , because she’d _grown up_ and _lived her life_ while he was gone, and he would’ve felt sick with the guilt if he wasn’t exhausted from jet lag - he had a feeling he was going to have to see or even speak to her sooner or later.

She’d looked exactly like he remembered her. Better, even, but everything and everyone looked better now than before he left. She stood next to Natiqa at the front of the massive room that had been set with chairs in countless rows for the ceremony, a radiant grin on her face as she watched Portia blubber her way through the vows.

Even the deep violet tux she wore did something for him, especially since he could tell even from the back of the room that she’d unbuttoned as many shirt buttons as she could get away with, and that someone had tailored the whole thing to emphasize the fact that she still had _magnificent_ thighs. _Shit._

Her hair was longer now than it used to be, or at least as much as he could remember, but he hadn’t forgotten the deep brown shade of it, and how he still hadn’t seen anyone else with dark hair that seemed to glow bronze in the right light. Or how he hadn’t seen anyone with green eyes that were actually truly _green_ since he’d met her over a weekend dinner with Mazelinka and Portia what seemed like a lifetime ago.

Shit. He was _fucked_.

He’d caught glimpses of her in the reception ballroom, and he wanted to find her, and say… what, exactly? They’d never been the best of friends before. She probably just thought of him as Portia’s asshole older brother who drank all their wine that one night.

 _That_ one night.

If he didn’t stop thinking about all this, he was going to spiral right back out, and he’d already resolved that he owed Portia at least one good thing, though it would never make up for the way he’d up and left and let everyone down.

Mazelinka stopped just short of reaching up to twist his ear to drag him over to the brides’ table. “Ilyushka! Have you been listening to me?”

Julian blinked. “Hm? Oh, of course I have, Mazelinka, you know that I listen to each and every thing you tell me.”

“Bullshit.” Mazelinka took him by the elbow. “Come walk your old grandma over to congratulate your sister, eh?”

Dutifully, Julian walked with Mazelinka, resolved to get at least one dressing-down from his sister over all of this, which was, of course, what he deserved. He was nothing short of surprised, then, when Portia leapt up from her seat to wrap her arms around him and laugh with delight. “Ilya! You’re back!”

Julian’s brain took a moment to catch up with his mouth - a rarity, which even he could acknowledge. “I wouldn’t miss it for anything, Pasha.”

His little sister stepped back to look at him, her eyes shining, and she furiously wiped away the tears threatening to spill past her lashes. “Thank you,” she said softly, and then brightened once more. She waved her left hand at him. “Look at this!”

“Oh, congratulations, you two,” Mazelinka said, leaning down to hug Nadia, who remained seated but let her hand rest on the small of Portia’s back. The three women all fell into conversation, something filled with warmth, something that made Julian stand back awkwardly, unsure of himself. He lifted his eyes to look around the room and—

There she was.

Vissenta looked gobsmacked to see him. He felt a cold twist of panic in his chest; was this bad? Was she upset? Was she mad at him? What did she have to be mad at him about? _Well, apart from everything, just in general, considering the circumstances._

But Vissenta merely raised an eyebrow at him, her expression gone cool and confident. Julian had to resist the urge to fall to his knees, and instead put his past half decade of flirting his way across a continent to good use and matched her expression. He saw her cheeks go pink, and his heartbeat sped up in response.

_Fucked. Absolutely fucked._

* * *

This was not the first time an attractive woman had bought Julian a drink.

He had this down to a science, by now, though he still wasn’t absolutely certain on the particulars of how he was able to manage to convince attractive women - and attractive men - to buy him alcohol. An art, then. Whatever it was, he seemed to have a particular talent for keeping his bar tabs low.

But this was Vissenta buying him a drink.

How he managed to keep his composure as she promptly ordered one of the nicest bourbons on the shelf was a mystery. How he managed to flirt back at her when she grinned that winning grin at him was a mystery. What was a mystery, just on the whole, was how he’d managed to end up slipping into an easy conversation with Vissenta Senadz at all.

He changed tack when she tried to pry into where he’d been the past few years. _Still too soon to tell that sob story._ Instead, he latched on to something he did recall Mazelinka telling him on the white-knuckle drive from the airport. “Now, how can you call yourself a disappointment when you’re the new star chef everyone in this city is talking about?”

Vissenta’s expression soured for just a moment, but she recovered quickly and took another sip of her bourbon. “Try telling that to Vincent Senadz.”

This did puzzle Julian into a rare bout of sincerity. “Your dad isn’t proud of you?”

Vissenta let out another one of those harsh, short laughs of hers. “Before you even try, yes, I know I’m lucky to have a dad alive to be disappointed in me.”

Julian couldn’t help himself and clutched at his chest. “Me? Try to use that argument? I would never.”

At this, Vissenta rolled her eyes and signaled the bartender. “Another Blanton’s, please.” She sighed and twisted around on the bar stool to shuck off her jacket and roll up her shirtsleeves.

Julian had to work very, very hard to not stare at her movements. At the way her shirt was, in fact, unbuttoned as far as it could go without her flashing the entire bar. How the black cummerbund of the tux hugged her waist and only accentuated the way her hips curved outward. The fact that when she rolled her sleeves up to her elbows, he could see a tattoo on her forearm. His mind wanted to zero in on that tattoo, wanted to look at it, wanted to trace the lines with his fingertips, wanted to rest his lips on—

_Goddammit._

Vissenta draped her jacket over the back of the chair. “It’s funny, you know. You’d think the fact that I’m a part-time lesbian would be what disappoints good old Catholic daddy dearest.” She stared moodily into her empty glass, but flashed a warm smile at the bartender when she was provided with a fresh drink.

Julian might’ve committed a felony or two to have that smile turned on him.

Vissenta continued. “But Marcelie’s a full-time lesbian, with a wife and a turkey baster baby and everything, but hey, she’s got that MBA.” She finally looked over at Julian and raised her eyebrows and her shoulders. “Funny where the priorities end up, huh?”

Julian furrowed his brow. “You were a business major, weren’t you?”

He could see her eyes widen slightly, her lips purse into a small O of surprise, but she quickly shifted back into the quirked-brow smirk that seemed to be her favorite expression. “Oh, you remember that, huh?”

 _I remember every single thing,_ he wanted to say.

“You complained a lot about your accounting classes,” was what he said instead.

Vissenta rolled her eyes. “I mean, who wouldn’t complain about those?” She sipped on her bourbon pensively, staring into the middle distance behind the bar. “I dropped out,” she said, finally.

Julian felt something that had been constricting his heart loosen, all of a sudden, and maybe it was the jet lag, maybe it was the booze, maybe it was just his usual poor decision-making, but he blurted out his first honest confession of the night. “So did I.”

The look Vissenta cut him spoke volumes. She looked as if she might ask, like she might try to dig deeper, but he must have gone pale with worry, must have gotten that look on his face that Asra called his cornered prey face once - _don’t think about Asra right now, don’t think about Asra ever -_ because rather than prod him further, she continued her own story. “You remember how we had dinner parties every weekend, right?”

God, he remembered. He remembered how many of them he missed, how he regretted it all the time, how when Portia finally got him out of his shitty single student-housing apartment to come over that he wondered why he didn’t do this more often. How Vissenta looked with her hair - that dark bronze-glowing hair, shorter back then, only just grazing her chin - plastered to her forehead with sweat, how she smiled with every new dish she brought out to the crowded dining room table, how the crowd actually grew every time.

Of course, all he could manage to say was “Yes.”

Vissenta’s smile softened a bit as she slipped into memory. “I loved it so much. I loved… I just loved feeding people. Creating new things. Making people happy. Creating that kind of… that space, you know? For people to come and… and enjoy themselves, and eat something delicious, and enjoy the company.” She took the last sip of her bourbon. “It’s how me and Tiqa got into the business. She finished her degree, because she’s got her shit together, but I…” She shrugged again. “I wanted to stop wasting my time on supply chain management classes. So I quit. Told Vincent that I could do what I wanted, and I started cooking with Selasi at the Raven.”

The Raven. The de facto bar for all the students and townies, a place Julian had closed down more than once in his day, staying all the way to last call and spending his scholarship money on triple-digit tabs there rather than more important things like books, or decent housing, or anything that might have actually set him up for success. He couldn’t help but give her a puzzled look. “So, you dropped out to make wings and cheese fries?”

Vissenta winked at him - oh God, she winked, he was going to die on the spot - and smiled. “Me and Selasi changed that whole menu. You should go back sometime for the fancy weekend dinner specials.”

At this point, Julian would go anywhere Vissenta told him to.

Vissenta sighed and signaled the bartender once more, this time for the tab. “Anyway, when me and Tiqa went to her parents about our whole idea to open up a place, they wanted an established name to go with it. Selasi was the perfect fit. And the rest is history.” She pointed at the clock hanging behind the bar. “Well, they’ll be closing up shop here soon.” She slid from her seat, pushing a stack of cash across the bar to settle up, and threw her jacket over her shoulder. “And you still owe me your story.” She bit her lip and for a split second looked unsure, and Julian felt his heart surge at the sight. “I’ve got a bottle of Moët in my room, if you’d like to come up for a nightcap.”

_Fucked. Absolutely fucked._

* * *

With a very good champagne to sip on - they passed the bottle back and forth, and Julian tried not to think too much about the implications, tried not to think about how the lip of the bottle still felt warm from Vissenta’s mouth when he took his turn for a drink - he found that another wall cracked, something else slipped down, and he could at least begin to say out loud the things that had happened since the last time they saw each other.

He’d leaned back on the bed - it was a very large bed, he could stay pretty separated, this wasn’t intimate at all, not in the least, it wasn’t - and stared at the ceiling. “So as it turns out, one has to actually have, ah, good habits, when they’re in medical school.”

Vissenta snorted. “Imagine that.” She snatched the bottle back from him, and her fingers brushed his, and he felt like he’d been on the receiving end of an electric shock. She took another swig and leaned forward. “So, what’d you do when you dropped out?”

“Did my very best to drink and fuck my way across Central Europe,” Julian said matter-of-factly. He tilted his face toward Vissenta, and a lazy grin spread across his face, his anxieties tempered by the woozy warmth of the fizzing champagne. He had to give her credit; she didn’t look terribly shocked, or affronted, and in fact looked downright delighted at the admission. He wondered if she noticed that another of his buttons had come mysteriously undone on the way from the hotel bar to her room. He’d been told he had a nice chest more than once. He at least owed her the return favor, for all the display she’d been putting on.

From the way her eyes flicked downward, he could very well have been correct to think she’d noticed. She licked her lips and he hoped she couldn’t see what that did to him, hoped she couldn’t see the way the gesture went straight to his groin, hoped that the warmth and stiffness he felt wasn’t immediately apparent to the casual observer.

Problem was, Vissenta wasn’t a casual observer.

She leaned toward him, her grin going mischievous, and he could see at the rapidly-closing distance between them that she had a scar along one eyebrow that left a rakish diagonal line along its length, and he wanted to ask her where that came from, but she spoke first. “You know, I don’t do this often.”

Julian swallowed, his mouth gone suddenly dry. “What, get drunk at weddings?”

Vissenta dropped the bottle. Thankfully, it was nearly empty at this point, and only a small amount splashed out to puddle on the thick carpeting of the hotel room floor. She leaned toward him and ran her fingers along his jaw. “No, kiss pretty men at weddings.”

_Fucked. Absolutely fucked._

She tasted like fine champagne. She tasted like fine champagne, and the lingering notes of good bourbon, and the summation of all the things he’d desperately searched for when he, in his own words, fucked his way across Central Europe. (None of the men and women he’d met seemed to scratch the itch, not really, and he thought that maybe he was broken, thought that maybe it was a him problem, and maybe it still was a him problem, but at least here, his problem seemed to match Vissenta’s problem, because it felt so right, and—)

Her lips parted, and he automatically slipped his tongue between them, and she let out a low chuckle that he swore he could feel all the way down in his chest, and he reached a hand up to brush back a strand of hair that had come loose from the long braid hanging down her back. She wove her fingers in the curls at the nape of his neck in response, and when she tightened her grip to tilt his head back so she could deepen the kiss, he groaned into her.

Vissenta hummed happily. “Should I do this more often?” The words were a murmur against his lips, and he almost didn’t want to answer, but the fact that she spoke to him, the fact that she was whispering these things against him rather than let everything happen in silence, it picked apart at what he’d woven over himself and he let out another blatant admission.

“If it’s with me, absolutely.”

She stilled, and Julian felt the panic creep in once more, and he was ready to get up and apologize and leave the room and possibly leave the country again, but then she was shifting, was swinging her leg over his, a leg that decidedly no longer had pants on, was coming up to straddle him and her hands were at her shirt buttons and she was smiling again. “Lucky you, to be the exception to the rule.”

He'd spent lonely nights thinking about those thighs before, wondering what it would be like to be beneath them, to be between them, stroking himself in vague shame and guilt at how vividly he could imagine them. Turned out he hadn't even come close to reality, and he allowed himself one look at the dark curls _between_ those thighs, and he felt himself go even redder and he snapped his gaze back up, trying his hardest to not think about the fact that he could _feel_ her through his suddenly constricting layers of clothing, and how she was already wet, and _oh God if I can taste her I might actually start believing in a higher power again._

He could only watch as she unbuttoned her shirt, slowly revealing that beneath the starched white fabric she wore something composed entirely of black lace and alchemy, and he could see the peaks of her nipples beneath the fabric, and he was done for. He was a goner. He was fucked in more ways than one, and all he could do was watch as something he’d imagined for years suddenly became reality.

She pushed against his breastbone, pushed him down against the impossibly soft pillows of the nicest bed in the nicest hotel he’d ever been in, and he lay back to let her do her work. She leaned forward to kiss him again, and he reached up to cup her jaw, and when his tongue slid against hers she shifted her hips forward against him and if he’d had any hope of hiding the fact that he’d gone harder than iron, there was no hiding the fact now. He had to hold himself back from rutting up against her, and she seemed as if she could tell, because she smiled against him again, smiled into his kiss, pulled her face back even as she rolled her hips forward. “Do bras work the same way across the ocean?”

Julian didn’t even have to ask what she meant and he brought his hands to the center of her back and found the hooks and guided them apart from the eyes of the fastenings, and she slid the straps from her shoulders. All he could manage to do after that was gaze at her, worshipfully, as she tilted her head to one side and smiled.

“Like what you see?” The question was soft, might have been confident, but he could hear the undercurrent of something in her voice, something he knew in himself, and he knew what to say, or rather not to say, and he tilted his head forward to catch one nipple between his lips and swirl his tongue in a tight circle until she gasped above him. She finally managed a strangled phrase, the words of a woman who liked to stay in control. “Guess so.”

He was more than happy to let her take control.

He continued to lavish attention on one breast, cupping it reverently, and then he was running his other hand up from her waist so he could stroke his thumb along her other breast, drawing it to a peak that made her breath catch with every pass of his fingertip, and she wove her fingers through his hair and let out the most delicious moans and gasps with every ministration of his tongue. He couldn’t have imagined this, not even once in his wildest fantasies, and there had been more than enough of those in those lonely nights he spent after seeing her and avoiding her, when they were younger, when he might have actually taken a gamble were it not for his single-minded drive to prove himself in ways that didn’t even matter anymore.

He didn't believe in a higher deity, but he would worship her now if she'd let him.

She pulled back, reluctantly, and reached for the table beside the bed. He wasn’t even aware of what was going on, couldn’t comprehend how her mind was still cohesive enough to think of these things, but the next thing he knew he saw her tearing at the corner of a square foil wrapper while giving him a knowing look. “I said I don’t do it often, not that I’m a nun.” She paused. “I’m sure Vincent would prefer that, though.”

Julian groaned. “Please don’t talk about your father as foreplay ever again,” he muttered.

Vissenta snorted, a sound he should have found unattractive, but since it came from her, it was still a glorious thing. “Fuck you.”

“Please,” Julian whispered, his voice gone high and strangled, and when Vissenta smirked at him again he threw his head back and closed his eyes because if he kept looking at her, kept looking at the way her lips curled, he was going to come in his pants, and that would have been even more humiliating.

“With pleasure,” she said, and she was unzipping his pants, pulling his cock free, rolling the condom over the tip of him and down along his length and guiding him into her greedily, and all he could think to do was grip her generous hips and let her pull him along the path of her pleasure. He dipped one hand to stroke at the juncture of her thighs, and when she sucked in a breath and smiled down at him, he did it again, and again, until her eyelids began to flutter.

_Absolutely, entirely, thoroughly, unapologetically fucked._


	3. Where Have You Been? Where Did You Go?

Vissenta unlocked the back door of the restaurant and shouldered her way in. She wasstill in the tux, now wrinkled and askew from the night it spent on the floor, and she’d never been so glad in her life that she kept spare clothes in the office here. She moved down the stairs to the basement level and wove her way through the racks in dry storage without even needing to turn on the light.

The motions were automatic at this point, practiced and easy and the only part of her life where she felt in control. She pulled leggings and a sports bra and socks from her duffel bag beneath the office desk and she unlaced her Docs to start changing. Out of last night’s clothes, out of the mussed reminder of what caused her hangover and the mild ache between her legs, and into the uniform that was her primary wardrobe for years now. She brushed out her hair and pulled it back into a tighter French braid and wrapped a bandana around to cover it, rummaged around for her spare deodorant and toothbrush, shoved her feet into clogs, and went to stare at herself in the staff bathroom mirror.

She already knew she looked like hell when she woke up this morning. Woke up naked and sticky with sweat and muzzy-headed and with her leg thrown over another naked body, which wasn’t in itself unusual, until she blinked her eyes open a little more to see the slack-jawed, passed-out-drunk face of Julian Devorak.

She’d fucked Julian.

She’d fucked Portia’s brother.

She’d fucked _Julian goddamn fucking Devorak._

As far as she could tell, from the memories that came swimming back as she’d blinked and stared at his mostly-closed eyelids and become suddenly aware of his hard-on pressing into her thigh - _Jesus Christ, no wonder things hurt today_ \- they had actually fucked at least twice, possibly three times, though the third time might have been when they both finally gave up and passed out in a heap of tired limbs and mumbled nonsense and, apparently, facing one another, with his lips pressed into her shoulder and her nose buried in his hair and, on the whole, arranged in a way that was entirely too cozy and intimate for her liking.

Extricating herself had been tricky, but she’d managed, and she threw her clothes on and in a panic bolted from the room, grateful that she’d only brought a small backpack and that she could make a hasty getaway, and she let her unsteady, still-a-little-too-drunk feet take her to the place where she felt most at home.

Honestly, the fact that she stood here brushing her teeth and contemplating a whore bath using shitty brown paper towels and lukewarm water from a hand sink made this place more of a home than her actual apartment. She couldn’t remember the last time she actually relaxed, or slowed down, or took her time to enjoy anything that wasn’t a cold beer after a dinner shift.

Shit, the last time she actually was home, she tried to use the work key to open the apartment door.

She shook her head and finished buttoning up her short-sleeved charcoal-gray chef jacket. There was a line to prep, a lunch service to run, a whole host of things she’d missed over the past two days that she’d taken off for the wedding weekend that needed catching up, needed her direct attention.

Upstairs, the lights were still off, though Vissenta knew Hector would be in any minute now. She started flipping switches, checking pilot lights, unzipping her knife roll, and puttering about in the practiced rhythm of firing the kitchen up to life. She pulled out her phone to find some music to drown out the noise in her head that sounded a lot like Julian’s groans and panting breaths in her ear and the way he uttered a soft “oh” when he came that had sent a jolt down her spine and even remembering it now was making her heart beat and _fuck I need to find something loud and obnoxious as soon as fucking possible._

Of course, her mission was interrupted by a message from Natiqa.

**Did you know there’s a leech infestation at the hotel?**

Vissenta squinted at the text, wondering if she’d read it correctly. No, that’s what it said, “a leech infestation.” She pinched the bridge of her nose for a moment before swiping out a curt response.

**Tf?**

Natiqa must have had her followup text ready to go because she pinged back in record time.

**Poor Julian had a neck full of bite marks and bruises when I saw him in the lobby.**

**Must have been leeches in the bathtub, huh?**

Viseenta scowled. She was ready to ignore Natiqa entirely and went to find some damn music already, but Natiqa wasn’t quite finished.

**You’re at the restaurant, aren’t you.**

Vissenta rolled her eyes. **Yes, I am, because it’s Monday.**

**I’m calling Selasi.**

**Don’t you dare!**

Vissenta wanted to hurl the phone across the kitchen, but then she wouldn’t have music to play, which was the entire point of picking the damn thing up right now. _Tiqa can suck eggs._

She heard the back door open just as she cued up something loud, with thundering drums and heavy guitar, and took a deep breath. “Morning, Hector!”

Her sous chef turned the corner and gave her a quizzical look. “You supposed to be here today?”

Vissenta shrugged. “When am I ever not here?”

Hector shrugged back in response, and the two of them got to work. While Hector fired up the grill and started on the sauces, Vissenta filled up the pot sinks and switched on the dish machine, clearing up some of the debris that the servers left in the dish pit the night before as she bopped her head along to the music. Cleaning everything up. Making it like the night before never happened. That’s what she could do. That’s what she did every day.

“Vissenta!”

She ducked her head down to look out into the kitchen proper to see Selasi striding through the swinging door from behind the bar. “Hey boss.”

“You have today off!” Selasi crossed his arms as he circled around the corner into the dish pit proper and frowned at Vissenta, his forehead creasing into lines that had become much deeper in the past six months. “Today and tomorrow, remember?”

Vissenta shrugged, putting her palms up. “I felt bad. I took two whole days off!” She went back to scraping away old food and tossing silverware into a plastic tub of soapy water to soak. “I took the _weekend_ off! Thought you could use the help here.”

“We have it under control.” Selasi rubbed the back of his neck and sighed. “Do I have to force you to actually take time off?”

“I took time off.” Vissenta crossed her arms, ready to turn this into as much of a standoff as she needed. “Two days. And now I’m back.”

Selasi’s smile was tired, but affectionate, and he shook his head. “If you don’t take the next forty-eight hours away from this building, I will fire you and promote Hector.”

Vissenta gasped. “You _wouldn’t_.”

With a knowing raise of his brows, Selasi poked his head around the corner. “Hector! You ever think about running a kitchen?”

“Every day, jefe!” Hector’s response was cheerful, casual, as if he knew this was all a bluff, but he did have a touch of eagerness in his voice that made Vissenta nervous.

She threw her hands up. “Fine. But when I’m back, I’m gonna be _back_.”

Selasi pointed. “Go. _Now._ ”

* * *

Vissenta did go, but she didn’t want to go home yet. If she was home, she was alone, and if she was alone, she would think about not being alone last night, and she didn’t want to think about not being alone last night.

_Shut up, you do want to think about it, you want to think about it too much._

So she let her feet take her on another familiar route through downtown, to get the biggest iced coffee she could find and to wander several blocks down until the houses and yards grew larger and older, a place she knew too well from her teenage years, though she avoided the places where someone might spot her that she didn’t _want_ spotting her. She walked a circuitous route, taking an extra few blocks east and then south, avoiding one old Queen Anne style house in particular, before tramping up the hill to an enormous wrought-iron gate with a wide stone archway at its opening.

Inside the gates of the cemetery, the city itself seemed to melt away. She supposed it was a kind of magic, something that banished the chatter, and just as the sounds of hustle and bustle faded from her ears, so did the feeling of all her thoughts that had been clamoring for purchase and attention in her mind. She slowed her pace, sipped her coffee, breathed in deep as she walked the winding, tree-lined path that led to the sexton, and then took a left, down the avenue that led to the oldest part of the cemetery.

The stones here were less polished, worn down by age and weather, and surrounded by larger memorials and statuary and mausoleums. Everything about it whispered old money, quiet and understated, but to Vissenta it spoke of comfort. Her feet knew exactly where to go; she probably could have found her way in the pitch dark of midnight without stumbling. Morning dew clung to the laces of her boots as she picked her way through footstones and headstones until she came to rest at a low stone wall that surrounded the Boudreau family plot.

The brightest, shiniest, newest memorial in the plot was still nearly a decade old, and the grooves and curves of the weeping angel that lay over the raised tomb were starting to show signs of age in the light dusting of gray-green moss and lichen that persisted despite the efforts of the people Vincent paid to keep it clean. Etched on the side of the monument were the three names Vissenta missed most:

_Catherine Boudreau Senadz_

She hated that Senadz was even on the stone. Her mother told her once that her middle name had been Mathilde, and that she hated it with a burning passion, but Vissenta always thought it was so pretty and romantic-sounding and begged to change her own name to something like that, rather than the testament to her father’s disappointment in not having a son that she was stuck with. Catherine Senadz had smiled at her and stroked her hair and told her, “We make the best of what we’re given.”

_“But why didn’t you keep Mathilde, mama?” Younger Vissenta loved to poke holes in the messy logic of grownups, a habit she hadn’t grown much out of in spite of technically being a grownup herself._

_Catherine just shook her head at that and smiled, more sadly this time. “You’ll understand one day, Vissenta Louise.” When her daughter had made a face at her own loathed middle name, she laughed. “Come on, let’s go learn to make roux.”_

Vissenta let out a long sigh. “You would have been so happy to see Portia, mama.” She leaned back, resting her palms on the rough stone wall beneath her, and crossed one leg over the other. “She cried as soon as she walked in and saw Nadia. Those big fat happy tears, like the time you brought us the housewarming wine but even better.” She could feel her own tears well up and furiously scrubbed them away. “We missed you there.”

She continued to talk as the morning sun crept closer to the top of the sky, burning away the dew on the grass, and the ice in her coffee melted down to nothing. She talked about the restaurant, and about the toast she gave, and with some hesitation, she tried to talk about the one person conspicuously absent in her retelling. “Julian was there,” she began, and then she didn’t know how else to continue. After all, even in death, one’s mother probably doesn’t need to know about how one rode out at least two orgasms on one’s best friend’s brother’s cock.

She went red. “It was nice to see him again. Guess he’s heading back to wherever he’d been, soon. I… I might kinda miss him when he does.”

Even that admission felt too intimate, and she lapsed into silence and listened to the rustle of the leaves in the Bradford pear trees that surrounded the plot. She turned her face up to the sun and breathed in deep once more, grateful that at least her private embarrassment had banished the tears fully. If she started crying, she wouldn’t stop, and she wasn’t ready to let herself go down that road just yet.

When she heard soft footsteps coming up the path, she was even more grateful that she hadn’t opened the waterworks, and she continued to let the sun warm her closed eyelids until she heard a voice she wouldn’t have expected in a million years.

“Vissenta?”

* * *

It was funny, how life found a way, sometimes. Of all the people Vissenta might have expected to find her in this place, in her safe haven from everything else, she wouldn’t have expected Julian to come walking up, in his black buttoned shirt and pants from the night before, hands awkwardly in his pockets as he slowed his pace when she turned at the sound of her name.

She didn’t know whether to laugh or cringe at the sight of the reddish-purple marks visible along his collarbone. If anyone had seen the two of them in the bar last night, then they knew exactly where those came from, and she wasn’t gonna hear the end of it, and not just from Natiqa. Instead or caving in to chagrin, she tilted her head and tried her best to school her expression into one of coolly mild surprise. “Stalking me, huh?”

Julian immediately blushed, all the way to his ears again, and Vissenta suddenly very much wanted to see how many times she could make him blush in a single conversation. He looked at the ground, at the sky, at a nearby tree, at just about everything around him before he could finally meet her gaze. “I, uh… I mean… that is…” He pulled one hand from his pocket and opened it to reveal the monogrammed cloisonné pill box that Vissenta didn’t even realize was missing from her backpack. “You dropped this.”

Her pretense of being calm and cool and collected dropped immediately and she gasped in relief. “Oh thank God. I would’ve torn my place apart looking for it.” She moved to stand up, but then thought better of it, or maybe worse of it, or maybe she didn’t think at all when she patted the space next to her on the wall. “Come sit a while.”

There was that blush again, and Julian’s free hand came up to rub at the back of his neck as he started walking again. “I, ah… sure. Thanks.” When he swung one long leg over the low wall, then the other, and sat down with his knees splayed out and his elbows resting on them, he stared at the ground for a while before remembering that he still held the pill box. “Oh! Oh.” He held it out to her, only just barely holding the small round thing in his fingertips, as if he hoped her fingers wouldn’t brush his in the process of taking it back.

Vissenta’s heart sank a little, and she didn’t know why, but she took the pill box from him and stared down at it. “Thanks,” she said, finally, and lapsed back into silence.

They sat there like that for a moment before they both began to speak.

“About last night—“

“I just wanted to say—“

Vissenta stopped and blinked rapidly. “You go first.”

Blush number three. Julian ran his hand through his hair - Vissenta wanted, very suddenly and very badly, to do that for him - and shot her a sheepish grin. “I had a, erm… a nice time.”

Vissenta couldn’t help but laugh at this. “You sure know how to compliment a lady.”

Julian looked stricken for a split second, but when he saw that Vissenta’s smile was genuine, his eyes crinkled up at the corners and he laughed softly himself. “I suppose I could have phrased that better.”

Shaking her head, still grinning, Vissenta leaned forward to meet his eyes. She nudged his knee with hers, trying not to notice that his eyes went slightly wide at the contact, and rested her cheek on her palm. “No, it’s great. Very you.” She turned the pill box over in her other hand. “Thanks for getting this back to me. It’s… important.” She traced the gold-lined letters of the monogram - _C.B._ \- and resisted the urge to press the latch and take out that half bar of Xanax.

Julian looked down at the pill box. “Natiqa said you were at Selasi’s Cafe, when I asked her if that was, ah, yours. And then Selasi said he made you leave, and that he saw you walking this way…” He trailed off, clearly unsure of how else to continue. He finally looked back up at her - _his eyes are so light gray, how did it take this long to notice what color they are -_ and smiled. “I’ve been in a lot of cafes. That was most certainly not a cafe.”

Vissenta laughed again, an easy sound that surprised her with how naturally it fell from her lips. “We all have a healthy appreciation for irony, I guess.” She slid the pill box into one of the pockets of her chef jacket and, without something to hold, began to twist her fingers together. “I’d say you should come eat there sometime, but I guess you’re heading back to…” She waved a hand in the air. “I don’t know, whatever part of Europe you’ve got on your fuck-it list next.”

It was Julian’s turn to laugh, and Vissenta found the sound even more addicting than the sight of him blushing. “Fuck-it list. I’ll have to remember that one.” He shook his head slightly, and met her eyes once more, and she felt her stomach lurch just the tiniest bit. “I’m staying here, actually.”

The tiny lurch of her stomach blossomed into at least one fully fluttering butterfly and she tried not to scowl as she willed the feeling away. “You, um…” It was her turn to stammer and search for words, and she began to suspect that it was her turn to blush soon, too. “You’re what?”

Julian’s smile turned sly, a look he’d probably practiced in the mirror, if Vissenta had to guess, but that didn’t make it any less attractive. “Teten’ka Tasya was so excited to get me out of her house that she gave me money to move back.”

Vissenta smirked. “That badly behaved, huh?” She noticed that he’d slipped into a slight accent at the mention of his aunt, one that shaped the vowels in the rest of his sentence until he gradually lapsed back into sounding more neutrally American, and she was a tinge disappointed that he had. _Jesus, how basic can you get when a foreign accent makes you wet?_ She shook her head and looked down at her feet.

“Do you, ah, want to get coffee?” Julian’s question came out almost timorously, the practiced cockiness gone from his voice all of a sudden.

Vissenta balked. She picked up her nearly empty iced coffee cup and shook it slightly. “I think I’m caffeine’d out.” She cut him a glance and saw that he actually looked a bit crestfallen, and she scrambled to recover, unsure of where the words came from or why they were spilling out. “Plus I have to go home, get a shower…” Shit. She hoped he wasn’t imagining her in the shower. _No, you do hope he’s imagining it._ She continued. “But Mazelinka always makes dinner for me and Portia on Monday nights.”

Julian’s eyes lit back up, and he pushed his hair back again as he smiled at her. “I’m not Pasha, but I can’t say no to Mazelinka’s cooking.” He blushed again - four times, and Vissenta decided that she was going to keep trying to break that record with every conversation - and dipped his head a bit, suddenly looking shy and young. “I don’t, ahem. I’d like to… I mean…”

Vissenta couldn’t help smiling and gently nudged his knee again. “Spit it out, Devorak.”

He looked sideways at her. “I’d like a friend, if I’m moving back. I don’t, ah… there’s not too many still here for me. Never were that many to begin with.”

With a deep breath, Vissenta felt a nervous knot in her chest loosen that she hadn’t even realized she was holding on to. “A friend. I think I can manage that.”


	4. You're Stuck In My Head, Stuck On My Heart, Stuck On My Body

Julian still hadn’t recovered from several embarrassments.

First, there was Natiqa’s knowing smirk when she spotted him on his way out of the hotel. When he’d seen himself in the mirror upon waking, once he mostly successfully moved past the quiet disappointment of Vissenta being gone, he’d been inwardly thrilled at the pattern of hickeys and bite marks from his jawline to his sternum. Shit, the sight of it alone made him hard again, and he took advantage of the shower just so he could finish himself off to the thought of how those marks had gotten there in the first place. But he hadn’t counted on just how visible they’d be, even with his collar buttoned up to a more normal height, and he knew everyone could see the evidence of last night on display.

(It thrilled him, even if he knew that as a grown man in his thirties he shouldn’t be doing these sorts of things, that people could see just how fully he’d been claimed like he was some horny teenager. It thrilled him and shamed him all at once.)

Then, there was that he’d actually gone sprinting off like a shot when Selasi told him which direction Vissenta had gone in. The thought did occur to him, later, that perhaps he could have just left the pill box at the restaurant, or even left it with Natiqa, and he might have avoided awkwardly explaining to Vissenta how he had, in fact, stalked her across downtown.

Then again, if he hadn’t done that, she might not have invited him to dinner.

Which did, in spite of how giddy it made him - _giddy, really, you’re not in your twenties anymore_ \- led to the third embarrassment of the morning. He realized, almost as soon as Vissenta smiled at him and said that she could be a friend - _we’re adults, we can be friends, we can even laugh about this all later down the line_ \- that he would have been having dinner at Mazelinka’s anyway. After all, it was where he was staying until he could manage to find a place of his own. When he admitted as much to Vissenta, she threw her head back and laughed, and the sound nearly made the embarrassment evaporate.

“Well, I guess I don’t need to give you my phone number, then,” she said, flashing him that dimpled grin. “I’ll know exactly where to find you.”

He stood. “Just as well, since I prefer carrier pigeon.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and stared up through the trees into the clear blue sky. “Keep a whole roost of them. Absolute hell to get them through airport security.”

From beside him, he could hear Vissenta standing and letting out one of those snorting laughs of hers. “Where were these jokes back in the day?” She stretched her arms up and rolled her neck around.

He pushed away the urge to grow moody, even though it was a familiar, comforting old friend, and slipped into self-deprecation instead. “Oh, I’ve always been a joke, I’ve just learned how to tell them, too.”

“Hey.” The soft sincerity of Vissenta’s voice made him look down into her eyes, which were trained on him with an unreadable expression, something he wished he could interpret, but it warmed him all the same, and he almost didn’t hear her next words for the rush of blood that went to his head. “As your friend, I’m gonna tell you to cut that out.”

He actually liked to hear her say she was his friend. He could push down the pang that came with the knowledge that it was the most he could hope for, a dull ache that he knew would ease with time. “As your friend, I’ll try my best.” He looked up at the sky again. “I probably should get a phone, though. Carrier pigeons are terrible in today’s information economy.”

Vissenta laughed again.

He wanted to keep making her laugh.

Maybe even do so without it being at his own expense.

She tugged a Sharpie from the slim pocket on one of her sleeves and a small pad of paper from one of the pockets at her hip. She scribbled down something, ripped the slip of paper free, and handed it over to him. “When you join the future, put that number in first.” She paused, tilted her head, raised one eyebrow up at him. “Well, after you add Mazelinka’s. I’m a terrible emergency contact.”

He folded up the paper and carefully slipped it into his pocket and sincerely hoped he didn’t look as giddy as he felt. “Speaking of Mazelinka, I’d better get back, before she sends an entire search party out for me.”

Vissenta nodded. “Smart man. Don’t piss off the badass babushka.”

It was Julian’s turn to laugh, and he couldn’t remember the last time his heart felt so full and yet so light at the same time. A friend. He really did need a friend. “Indeed.”

* * *

As instructed, Julian did immediately put Mazelinka into his contacts as soon as he found himself in possession of a phone (he wasn’t that much of a Luddite, not really, but his disappearance before meant that he generally avoided ways he could be easily contacted, instead choosing to let Tasya relay messages, which is how he’d been so predictably almost late coming back to the country), and Vissenta second. He stared at the screen for a while, wondering if maybe he should send her a message, or try to call her, or—

_Don’t be an idiot. You’ll see her for dinner._

Dinner that was still at least six hours away.

Mazelinka wasn’t nearly as concerned about his whereabouts as he’d initially assumed. “You’re a grown man, Ilyushka,” she groused at him as she tidied up in the living room. “Just don’t bring anyone else into my house that I haven’t met first.” She handed him a dust cloth. “And if you’re going to be here, make yourself useful.”

So he did. He did what Mazelinka asked of him, including stay out of the kitchen once she began cooking, and slipped up to the attic room to sort through his bare-bones possessions and arrange the accoutrements of his most recent life on the narrow twin bed.

At least Tasya had generously given him enough to find somewhere to stay, though the particulars of how he’d continue to pay for a place to stay still eluded him. Her prerequisite for her gift had been for him to promise to not come back and bother her and drink all her vodka for at least another five years.

It was a fair compromise.

He shook his head. Some of these problems were for tomorrow Julian, while today Julian needed to worry about making himself into something remotely presentable for a quiet dinner at home with his grandmother and the woman who was most certainly just his friend, because she was Pasha’s friend, and because that’s what she wanted to be for him. And God knows, he didn’t need to fuck this up.

With a fresh shirt and renewed resolve he headed back down the stairs, ducking his head to avoid the low doorway that led up to the attic, and heard Mazelinka grumbling at another, younger voice in the kitchen. The sounds formed into words, the closer he got.

“Mazelinka! I’m just trying to help.”

“Pah! Sit at the table and help by opening that bottle you brought!” Mazelinka’s voice was as gruff as usual, but suffused with warmth and affection, and Julian realized with a pang that Vissenta might be more like family than he was at this point. “I don’t need you stealing my soup recipe!”

“You know I would never!” When Julian turned the corner into the kitchen, he could see Vissenta’s back, her long hair now looped up into a braid that went around her head, with tiny tendrils of fine hair curling along her nape, brushing the back of the collar of a shirtdress, one she wore belted around the middle, with those same worn leather Doc Martens on her feet that she’d been wearing at the cemetery today. She was bent over a bottle of wine, still not sitting at the table as Mazelinka requested, but certainly making quick work of pulling the cork from the bottle with easy, practiced movements. She peered over her shoulder at him and grinned. “Oh, look who’s decided to join us, Maz!”

His knees went weak. Friends. Right.

“I am, as always, fashionably late.” He made a flourishing bow, then looked at Vissenta and winked, and saw that she went just a little pink in the cheeks. He did his best to not get a better look at her legs from this vantage point.

_Ilya Devorak is a thigh man. Who would have thought?_

He straightened, and gratefully accepted the glass of wine that Vissenta handed him. He took a moment to swirl it, delicately sniff at the deep red liquid, and raised an eyebrow when Vissenta did the same as he raised the glass to his lips. He might not have learned much on his Continental fuck-it list, as she’d so charmingly put it, but he’d certainly learned the intricacies of several kinds of alcohol. He ran his tongue between his lips as he tasted. “Fitou?”

Vissenta had been looking at the way his tongue moved, he was sure of it, but when her eyes flicked back up to his she was as cool as ever. “Impressive.”

He took a deeper drink from the glass before moving to pull out a chair. “I believe I heard Mazelinka tell you to sit.”

Vissenta rolled her eyes. “Mazelinka always tells me to sit.”

“Hrm.” Julian gave her a knowing look and lowered his voice. “What was that about not pissing off the badass babushka?”

Vissenta huffed and gracelessly collapsed into the chair, while Julian pulled out one for himself and sat down with a bit more poise. He watched her pour her own glass of wine, take a sip, close her eyes and smile and lick her lips, and he was positive that she was getting her revenge for the same display he’d just put on.

He didn’t mind whatsoever.

The spell was broken by Mazelinka coming over to swat at his shoulder with the butt end of her wooden cooking spoon. “Did I teach you nothing about setting the table?”

The evening fell into the easy familiarity of something Julian didn’t know he’d been missing until he was presented with it now, and he still couldn’t quite place what exactly it was. He listened as Mazelinka asked Vissenta about the restaurant, offered up his own brief answers when either of them tried to ask him about his time staying with Tasya, and ate what he realized was the first really good meal he’d had in years. The food wasn’t pretty, but it was hearty, and it filled something in him, eased an ache that he’d known for so long now that he almost forgot that it wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place. _Home._

Against Mazelinka’s wishes, Vissenta insisted on washing up, and Julian was compelled to join her. Mazelinka sat back at the table and watched them both for a moment before turning her attention down to her phone.

Julian looked over his shoulder and nudged Vissenta. “Is this normal? Does she play with that thing all the time?”

Vissenta rinsed a plate and reached for another, her elbow rubbing up against his in the process. “Oh, you have no idea. Carrier pigeons don’t have fun romance games.”

Julian felt his face warm. “R-romance games?”

“Oh, grow up, Ilyushka,” Mazelinka said from the table. “I’m old, I’m not dead.”

Vissenta barked a laugh. “It’s fun. And she’s right. She’s not dead.” She began to carefully rinse out the wine glasses. “So,” she said, lowering her voice. “Up for seeing how the Raven’s changed since you left?”

Julian grinned down at her. “As a matter of fact, my social calendar is completely empty.”

* * *

As far as Julian could tell, the Raven hadn’t changed much in the years since he left Vesuvia. All the old memorabilia - newspaper clippings, records, college sports team photos, Polaroids from staff parties of yore - still littered the walls, and he was fairly certain the battered chairs and booths hadn’t been replaced or possibly even revarnished in at least two decades. But there was an air of something about the place now, something every so slightly different, even as it felt so comfortingly the same. There was new life, new excitement, with much livelier patrons than he remembered from his days and nights spent in a corner booth.

People there knew Vissenta, too. The two of them couldn’t pass by a table or booth without someone stopping them to say hello, to ask her how Selasi’s Cafe was going, to say they’d love to catch up sometime. Some of them were those Julian presumed were her fellow industry professionals, from the casual lingo they threw around that was only just this side of comprehensible to him, but many seemed to be important. People with suit jackets thrown carelessly over the backs of seats, people with serious faces built for hobnobbing, people who surely meant she had far more social capital than she’d ever let on in her easy dismissal of his questions at the hotel bar the night before. And she slipped into a sort of practiced ease that he didn’t know she possessed, answering questions breezily, changing her phrasing and inflection depending on who was asking, until they finally reached the bar. When she turned to look at him, her smile had gone strained. “I sure picked the wrong week to quit smoking.”

Julian tilted his head toward her. “Those things will kill you, you know.”

“God, will anyone stop reminding me?” Vissenta flashed the bartender a grin and took the two beers he sat down in front of her without her even having to order. “You’re a saint, Sander.”

The bartender grinned. “Make em boilermakers?”

Vissenta winked. “My man.” She twisted to look at Julian while they waited for their extra shots of whiskey. “So, what do you think?”

Julian had been staring. He’d been staring at the tattoo on her inner forearm, more clearly visible now that he had a chance to pause to look at it. It was of a heart, bright red and bleeding, and running through the heart were three chef knives. It reminded him of something, though he couldn’t quite place what, and the thought was plaguing him even as Vissenta looked at him expectantly, waiting for a response. “Er, sorry? I’m sorry. What was the question?”

Vissenta tilted her head down, looked up at him through her lashes with that same unimpressed stare she’d given him at the wedding reception, and he smiled sheepishly. She jerked her head vaguely back, gesturing to the whole of the front room of the bar surrounding them. “The Raven. What do you think?”

By now, their shots had arrived, and they both took their drinks to find someplace to sit. “Busy,” Julian finally managed, feeling as if he had to shout to be heard over the din.

Vissenta was leading them back outside, back to the expansive outdoor seating they’d woven through on their way in, and she craned her head around until she spotted a familiar face in the crowd. “Oh, there’s some of my errant children,” she said, pointing at a massive table where a small black-clad crowd was laughing raucously over empty pint glasses and half-eaten baskets of wings. She beamed up at him. “Wanna make some more friends?”

Julian grinned back down at her. “Only if they’re yours.”

She gave him another one of those inscrutable looks again, not entirely bad, but not one that Julian could easily parse. Still, it was a look that ended in a soft smile, and she turned to walk. “C’mon then!”

The table was actually two shoved together, and the bunch milling about were a mix of cooks and waiters, all joking and laughing and smoking and speaking more of that strange lingo that Julian, he who could speak seven languages and get by in at least four more, still found to be so wild and exotic in its patter, the ease with which they all spoke to each other about things he’d never even considered in all his years of dining out. He and Vissenta sat down, and she enthusiastically greeted those immediately seated to their left as he sat back to listen.

_“And when they asked to split seven ways, I thought I was gonna punch a hole in the POS.”_

_“Came back for a refire on a med-well and I was already six deep in the weeds.”_

_“Please don’t tell Selasi how many comps I had to ring tonight.”_

It all washed over Julian in a jumbled mess, and he looked at Vissenta, bewildered, searching for an anchor. She smiled, then hesitated, then reached for his hand and gave his fingers a squeeze. “They don’t bite,” she murmured, and then her eyes settled on the marks just barely visible on his collarbone in the dim light.

Julian could feel himself blushing scarlet. He picked up the shot glass of whiskey and held it up towards Vissenta. “To friends?”

She blinked, and something in her eyes shifted, and she smiled again. “To new friends,” she said, raising her own shot glass in a toast, and they both tossed the liquor back.

* * *

They stayed until last call.

It was becoming a habit, apparently.

The rest of the group had split off in ones and twos, drifting away to take taxis home or stumble away to new adventures, until finally it was just Vissenta and Julian sitting at the end of the long makeshift table.

She was avoiding his gaze, and he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. Walk her home, maybe, or call her a cab, or do anything but what he wanted to do, which was reach for her chin to tilt her face to his and give her a kiss. _Friends. To new friends. We are friends._

It was a lie, and he knew it, and he knew that she knew it.

As if in answer to his wandering thoughts, Vissenta finally looked up at him. “I don’t live far,” she said. “Might even have a couple beers in the fridge.”

Julian wasn’t interested in more beers.

Still, he walked her home, staying at a respectful distance, letting her lead the way and call the shots. He wasn’t one to push his luck, not when everything still felt so fragile, not when his happiness rested on a delicate, shimmering bubble of hope predicated entirely on his not fucking up monumentally. He knew his track record on that score. So he stayed a good six inches away from her, even when they walked up the narrow stairs in an old building that had once been a rather grand old house and now was split into four apartments, and he let her walk in first and invite him in before he crossed the threshold.

The first thing he noticed was that the kitchen was the most well-stocked part of the studio. The counters and cabinets were overflowing with equipment and spices and jars of preserves and pickles, and there were stacks of cookbooks all over, some creased open to grease-splattered pages that had scribbled notes in the margins. He wanted to look closer, wanted to peer into this part of her that he’d only ever seen from a dining room table, but he was so afraid, so unsure, so certain that the moment he took a look at the bared pages of her soul that she’d disappear.

Vissenta looked at him nervously, then looked at her refrigerator. “So, the beers.”

Julian couldn’t stand it any longer.

He took two steps to close the distance between then and reached for her, cupped her face in his hand, and cast a hooded gaze down at her. “What about them?”

Vissenta hesitated, then threw her arms around his neck. “Nothing.” She leaned up on tiptoes to brush her lips against his, and he held back, he didn’t want to destroy the balance, but the moment she ran her tongue along his lips he knew she’d gained entrance and taken footing and there was no turning back.

With the apartment being so small, the mattress atop a box spring that served as her bed wasn’t far, and she pulled him over, pushed him down, climbed on top of him and firmly planted her legs on either side of his waist so that her shirtdress was hiked up indecently, and she was already working at the buttons. She pulled away from his lips, catching the lower one between her teeth and tugging for a moment before she broke away entirely and moved to start kissing and nibbling at his neck and he might have been lost, but there was something else he wanted first.

“Wait.”

Vissenta drew back as if she’d been prodded with something unpleasantly electrified and frowned down at him. “I’m sorry,” she began. “I just…”

“It’s not that” Julian began. He bit his lip, still looking up at her, still ready to slip into the practiced dance they’d done the night before, but he had to. He had to. “Can I…” He shifted to sit up straighter, to move his weight so that he could press his hand to the small of her back and let his weight shift over hers, to guide her onto her back.

Vissenta seemed to know exactly what he was getting at, with the way her pupils dilated, the way her breath hitched and she ran her thumb over his lips. Still, she raised an eyebrow, one that he noticed was notched with a scar, and her lips curled to one side in a wry smile. “Can you what?”

He kissed her then, pressed his lips to hers, felt the way they parted, relished in the way she craned her neck up to meet him from her prone position, shivered when she went to taste his tongue again, and he wished her hair was down so he could weave his fingers through it. Instead, he settled on cupping her face in his hands, stroking her jaw, letting her run her nails lightly up his back over the fabric of his shirt, shivering when she slowly stretched one leg to crook around the small of his back, guiding his hips down to hers. He pulled back, ignoring her small whine, and began to kiss down her neck, moved his hands to push up the hem of her dress to rest at her hips, and ghosted his palms along the flimsy mesh fabric that sat beneath her clothing as he set to work giving her a few marks along her neck to match the ones she’d left on him.

“Can you what,” Vissenta hissed beneath him, and in response he moved one hand to run his fingers over the damp fabric that covered the heat of her, and her answering hiss was deeper, a breath sucked in that he wanted to hear again, but of course, she’d asked him a question.

He lifted his head to look into her half-lidded eyes. “Taste you,” he rasped out, and when she bit her lip and nodded furiously, he felt that same light bursting in his heart that he’d felt earlier, in all the moments when her knee touched his, or she smiled at him, and he couldn’t think about it too much, and so he lowered himself further to do what he’d asked.

_Ilya Devorak is a thigh man, if those thighs belong to Vissenta Senadz._

The thought, oddly clear and enunciated in his mind as he pulled down the thong that barely shielded her from him, rang out as he went to press a kiss to one of those thighs, then the other. He slid both his hands beneath her, lifting her hips up oh so slightly, and she fell open for him, and another though crossed his mind as he traced a line to the center of her with his tongue.

 _Dinner, drinks, dessert_.

He started slow, pressing feather-light kisses, teasing her just so until she couldn’t stand it anymore and she wove one hand in his hair and pulled him to her. His cock twitched in response to the sharp, delicious pain of it, and he let her guide him, let himself lose control as she ground against his face, and it was all he’d ever wanted. He opened his mouth more, tracing his tongue upand around and into the slick folds of her, tasting her, just as he’d asked to, tasting and savoring, and when he ran the flat of his tongue over her clit and she bucked against him, he couldn’t help but smile and hum appreciatively. The sensation of that hum must have done something to her, because she moaned, actually moaned, and he was pressing himself against the mattress, desperate to find friction but desperate to keep pleasing her, and he repeated the motions, this time almost lapping at her greedily, the musky taste of her overwhelming him, and he could feel his chin growing wetter as she pulled him closer to him.

He could die like this. He could die, smothered between her thighs, and he would die a happy man.

She didn’t come quietly. Her moans became something guttural, something primal, and she gripped his hair with both hands as she rode out her climax, and only when she sprawled back out did he realize that the soles of her boots were pressing into his back.

That was a conversation for another day. One he hoped they might have, and have extensively.

For now, she was pulling his face up to hers, kissing him as deeply and hungrily as he’d just been tasting her, and when she finally pulled away, she was smiling, halfway gone, eyes still halfway rolled back in bliss. “Julian,” she murmured.

“Vissenta,” he responded, not sure what else he could say.

She snaked a hand down between them, palmed him where he strained against his pants. “We’re doing terribly at this friends thing.”

He couldn’t help but smile against her lips. “Seems to be going well enough for me.”

“Mm.” Vissenta was already tugging at his belt. “I take that as a yes?”

Oh, it was a yes.

It would always be a yes.

It would always be a yes, no matter how much it might hurt him later.


	5. I Don't Know What I'm Feeling, But I Believe

Vissenta woke with a start. Her eyes took a minute to adjust to the darkness of her apartment, illuminated only by the streaky glow of a streetlight filtered through trees and through blinds, and she propped herself up on her elbows.

Julian was sleeping next to her again.

She shifted, glad that this time the two of them weren’t quite as thoroughly entwined as they’d been the night before, and pushed herself up from the bed. She stumbled into the bathroom, suddenly very self-conscious about the fact that Julian was still mere feet away from her, and she hoped he was a heavy sleeper, because she had to _pee_. She shut the door, keeping the knob turned as far left as she could hold it, to try and keep the latch from clicking too loudly, and sat down. She buried her face in her hands, mortified, wondering if she’d ever peed so loudly in her life. _You’re both adults,_ she chided herself. _He had his face in your crotch and fucked you with his tongue, he’s not gonna leave over hearing you pee._

Because of course, that was the sudden fear. That he’d leave.

Well, maybe not so sudden. She always had the constant buzz of anxiety - hence the Xanax prescription, hence the shrink she still saw once a month like she had every month for five years now, hence the reams of paper probably in a file about her in that goddamn hospital - and without work to distract her today, it had settled like a weight in her ribcage. Everyone left, after a point. She liked to be the one to leave first, more often than not, because it was easier, always so much easier. She wanted him to stay, but then she didn’t know what _she_ would do if he did, because she didn’t _know_ what to do, and she couldn’t leave, because it was _her house_.

This is why she never brought anyone home.

She winced as she flushed, knowing that if her moving around hadn’t woken Julian by now, the sound of the ancient plumbing in this century-old house was sure to startle him out of even the most peaceful drunk slumber. She scowled at herself in the mirror as she washed her hands, then unpinned and unbraided her hair to let it out into a wild mess, one that should have theoretically looked glamorous and sexy with waves creased into it from the braid. Between the way it swamped her face, with her bangs askew, and her mascara gone smudged all around her eyes, all she saw in the dim bathroom light was the Babadook’s less hot sister. She sighed. Time to face the music, and probably an empty bed.

But Julian hadn’t left.

He was awake, that was for certain. He’d sat up to lean against the wall, where the mattress was shoved into the corner, and he was looking toward the window. In the streetlight glow, the planes of his arms and chest and cheekbones were all so much sharper, a study in chiaroscuro, and the furrow of his brow made Vissenta’s heart ache. He turned to look at her as soon as she opened the bathroom door, and even in the dim light, she could see him blushing.

Jesus, the blushing was cute.

He moved to clamber out of bed, already reaching for his clothes. “I’m sorry. I should… I could…” He faltered a bit and looked back at her, biting his lip, looking sheepish. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep here.”

 _There it is._ Vissenta crossed her arms and hoped her shoulders didn’t slump too visibly. “It’s late,” she mumbled. “You could… you could leave in the morning.” She was swaying back and forth on her feet all of a sudden, nervous, afraid to meet his eyes, so she stared at his hair instead. Stared at the way it now stuck up in peaks and waves from the back of his head, a riot of deep red even in the lines of artificial blue-white light from the window, and the way that one long curl still flopped down over his right eye in spite of all his attempts to keep it back. When she finally could bring herself to look lower, to trace his forehead, where the lines of worry between his eyebrows were starting to take hold even when his brow wasn’t furrowed, and finally down to those light gray eyes that were still so _bright_ , even in the dark, she saw with a jolt that he looked… hopeful?

Relieved?

And, suddenly, so was she.

Julian settled back down on the bed, a soft smile tugging at his lips, and he looked shy again. “I’ll stay,” he said.

Vissenta nodded briskly. “Good. Sensible thing to do. Mazelinka doesn’t need you barging in at…” She squinted at her stove clock. “Three forty-five in the morning.”

Julian’s smile turned to a grin at this. “Can’t piss off the badass babushka.”

Vissenta slid beneath the sheet, suddenly unsure of whether she should touch him, unsure of whether it was too much for him, if it would be too much for her, but Julian gently wrapped one arm around her shoulder, and she sighed so deeply that she could feel herself blushing in embarrassment. Thank God for the dark.

* * *

When she woke in the light of day, Vissenta tensed again, ready to flee, ready to run, until she remembered once more: _it’s_ my _goddamn house._

She turned over to see Julian still sleeping, his chest rising and falling so gently, his mouth parted open ever so slightly, and something new and unusual lanced through her heart at the sight. It would be a shame to wake him when he was sleeping so peacefully. She couldn’t kick him out just yet.

Still, she couldn’t just lay there and watch him sleep. She had to get up and move. Resting was never her default state, even on her days off, and some pretty man sleeping in her bed wasn’t going to change that habit. So once more, she untangled herself from him, and padded across the apartment to at least find some underwear and a shirt to wear.

Made minimally decent, she tread as softly as she could to the kitchen to start making coffee. She ended up having to shake the last spoonfuls of ground beans from the bag to have only just enough to brew a full pot. With a sigh, she scribbled another note for herself, one that she knew would probably get lost in the shuffle, but she stuck it to the fridge anyway.

Soon the smell of coffee filled the apartment, and Vissenta was poking around in the refrigerator in hopes she might have something to scrounge up for breakfast when she heard Julian begin to stir. She rinsed out a mug and filled it with coffee. “Morning, friend.”

She pretended not to see Julian’s small wince as she brought him the coffee. “Morning to you too, _friend_ ,” he replied, giving her a lopsided grin not unlike the one he’d given her in the hotel room, and gratefully accepted the mug from her.

Jesus, had that really only been a day and a half ago? Vissenta’s head was spinning at the way time worked, or didn’t work properly, or whatever the fuck was happening when she was under the influence of Julian Devorak.She blinked, then smiled, and went back to pour herself a cup. When she came back to perch on the bed next to Julian, she also pretended not to see the clear outline of his morning wood beneath the sheet draped over his lower half. “Sleep well?”

Julian hummed, chuckling against the lip of the mug. He took a long sip, closing his eyes in a look of momentary bliss, and tilted his head back to rest it against the wall. “The fact that I slept at all was noteworthy.”

“Mm.” Vissenta sipped her own coffee. “If you need anything to help you sleep, I’ve got a whole pharmacy in the bathroom.”

Julian started. “You what?”

Vissenta waved a hand, trying her best to look nonchalant. “Oh, it’s all legal, all prescribed, don’t worry.” She cupped her mug with both hands and avoided his gaze. “Just your run of the mill collection of DSM codes here.”

This time, when she looked back up at Julian, the look of concern on his face actually was too much to bear. He must have picked up something from her scowl, because he blanched and tried his best to back away, even though there was an entire wall behind him to keep him from actually escaping. “I’m not judging,” he said quickly. “I just… I didn’t know.”

Vissenta shrugged. “How could you know? You were gone when it all happened.”

That disappointed look was on Julian’s face again, but he looked disappointed in _himself_ , like he was ready to launch into some self-deprecating monologue (Vissenta knew the look, because she was uncomfortably aware that it was one she’d borne herself), so when he opened his mouth to start, Vissenta stood up. “Breakfast?”

Julian blinked up at her, whatever had been on his mind apparently gone, and he looked confused for a split second before the grin was back, and he cocked one eyebrow. “You mean I get breakfast made by _the_ Vissenta Senadz?” He ducked when she lobbed a dish towel at him. “What? I’m honored! This wonderful, amazing _,_ gorgeous, _talented_ chef is cooking just for me?”

Vissenta rolled her eyes, glad to be back on familiar territory. “Don’t push your luck.” She picked up a knife and pointed it at him, waving it in mock threat, before she began to slice an onion and dice some potatoes. “And if you tell anyone, I’ll kill you.”

Julian held up a hand in mock surrender. “Far be it from me to disobey the woman with the knives.”

They lapsed into an easier silence then, and Julian stood to tug his underwear and pants back on. He leaned on the counter that separated the kitchen from the rest of the apartment, and Vissenta poured him a second cup of coffee in between her work at the stove, where she had two cast iron skillets sizzling away with bacon in one and hash browns in the other. She could see him eyeing the cookbooks that were open on the countertop, and she jerked her chin down. “You can look at them, if you want.”

The way Julian immediately, gently ran his fingers over the open pages of the book closest to him made her chest hurt, and she wanted it to keep hurting, wanted to watch him read as her heart swelled beyond all reasonable dimensions. She watched him turn the page, almost reverently, watched the way he traced some notes she’d made on this particular recipe, watched his lips moving soundlessly as he read it to himself.

She knew what the words were.

_Try with Mama’s brick roux._

Julian looked up at her. “Brick roux?”

Vissenta nodded. “Cajun cooking at its core.” She turned back to flip the potatoes and move the strips of bacon around, keeping the browning even, her motions automatic and attuned to the idiosyncrasies of the old gas range she cooked on so rarely these days. “I like to tweak things, make them the way I think…” She paused, bit her lip, suddenly unable to say the words.

Julian let the silence linger briefly, then moved on, to Vissenta’s immense gratitude. “Are these recipes for Selasi? For the cafe?” He lingered on the word “cafe,” drawling it out, emphasizing the absurdity of a restaurant with enough seating for seventy-five and a massive private dining room besides having the moniker “cafe.”

With a mischievous smirk over her shoulder, Vissenta shook her head. “Definitely not. These are for me. For…” She trailed off, then shook her head. “How do you like your eggs?” She pointed her spatula at him as threateningly as she could manage, though without the sharp point of steel, the gesture was a little lost. “And if you make _that_ joke, I’ll make sure you can’t fertilize anyone’s eggs for the rest of your life.”

Rather than the look of panic he’d had before, back on the bed, Julian simply grinned, and the way his lips curled up slightly higher on one side than the other made Vissenta’s stomach do a backflip. “You’re the chef. I’m at your mercy.”

Vissenta lifted one brow before she turned back to the stove. “Smart boy.”

Soon, she had two full plates to sit on the countertop, and she topped off her coffee while she searched for some clean flatware. They both fell upon their breakfasts with abandon, back in that comfortable silence, this time punctuated by the clinking and scraping of forks against glazed ceramic. Vissenta couldn’t help but notice that as Julian devoured the fried potatoes and onions and over-easy eggs, he carefully avoided the bacon. Her face and heart fell, but his enthusiasm for the rest of the food eased her mind, and her first thought was _I guess it’s time to start buying turkey bacon._

Why this was her immediate reaction, she could not tell. Still, it went into her mental catalogue, along with her note to buy more coffee, and she reached over to take the bacon from his plate so she could eat it instead.

After a few more minutes, Vissenta was the first to speak. “So, did Portia ever tell you about when I joined the dead mom club?”

The look Julian gave her was pained, but sympathetic, and his hand hovered for a moment, as if he wanted to cover hers with his, but he held back. “No,” he said, finally, uncharacteristically terse.

Vissenta sat her fork down and wove her fingers together around her coffee mug. “It wasn’t long after you left. Mom… Mama had a lot of problems. Things that just got to her after a while.” She blinked and took a deep breath and stared into the coffee dregs. “It was Christmas,” she said, the words so small, her voice so tiny, and she felt her throat start to close up, but she took a deep breath, because she had to say this.

If they had any hope of being friends, she and Julian needed to get this shit out of the way first.

She continued. “Vincent was upset, because she hadn’t come downstairs to open whatever shitty diamond necklace he’d bought her, so I went upstairs to get her. Thought she’d overslept, maybe.”

She felt Julian’s fingertips brush the back of her hand and she flinched, but stilled and let him run his thumb along the ridge of her knuckles, and she breathed in deep once more. “She was in the bathtub. She--“ The words stopped then, they couldn’t move further, they were caught in her teeth along with her tongue, which she bit down on, because the pain always distracted from the memory, from the vivid picture behind her eyes.

Julian’s thumb disappeared from her knuckles, and when she glanced up, he’d dipped his head to brush his lips there instead. “Vis,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me this.”

 _Vis._ God, if they were using nicknames already, she didn’t know what else there was for them to do or be, any other way to get closer. She shook her head. “I do, though,” she said shakily. She looked at him again, met those sad, hooded gray eyes of his, and did her best to smile. “This is privileged friend information. Best friend information, really.”

Julian smiled back at her, a smile as sad as his eyes, for once. “Well, I’m honored,” he replied. “It seems to be an exclusive club.”

Vissenta couldn’t help her soft laugh. “Almost as exclusive as the dead mom club.” She blinked again, sat down her coffee cup and reached up to brush at her eyelashes, and when she looked at Julian again, he was still looking at her, still with that stare of his that made her stomach do such strange things, made her heart feel too big for her chest. “You can stay longer than the morning,” she said, finally. “Unless you’ve got a prior engagement.”

Julian shook his head fervently. “Absolutely not. Nothing. Nothing more important than sitting right here.”

* * *

Of course they fucked some more.

Still, Vissenta didn’t feel right, thinking of it as fucking. What she did on her late-night hookups at the Raven, or when she took a phone number from a pretty patron at the restaurant bar, or when she dragged someone into another bar bathroom on another of her benders, that was fucking. The tangle of limbs on her own bed, in her own apartment, surrounded by the fragments of her private life that she never let anyone else see…

That was something else.

They started out laying on the bed, talking some more, mostly Vissenta talking some more as she answered Julian’s questions about what she’d been doing for five years now.

_“No, I didn’t go to culinary school.”_

_“Mama was from New Orleans, and she taught me how to cook.”_

_“I want my own place, and I’m gonna call it La Brasserie Mathilde.”_

_“No, not brassiere, you dumbass.”_

Of course, jokes about bras led to Julian cupping her breasts and remarking that she wasn’t wearing one, and Vissenta adored the way she felt with his arms around her, and she let him slide his hands beneath the hem of her t-shirt to cup her breasts properly, to circle his fingers around her nipples until she was gasping, and then they were lost in each other again.

He was so gentle with her, so much so that she almost didn’t want to take from him, but when she nipped at his jaw and he sucked in a breath and grew impossibly harder against her thigh, she did it again, and again, and rolled the muscle where his jaw met his neck between her teeth, and Julian practically spasmed against her and let out a guttural moan at the sensation.

They fell into a confusion of licks, and nips, and teeth and tongues and fingers, delving into every part of each other, breathing in and breathing out, and when Vissenta thought she couldn’t possibly find this new and exciting any longer - they’d fucked twice already, or three times, or however many, but two nights! two nights in a row - she held Julian’s face in her hands as she rocked her hips forward and back and watched him come undone beneath her.

She knew she was lying to herself and lying to him.

She knew this wasn’t what friends do.

But if she called it anything else, if she put a name to it, if she assigned it a deeper feeling, then he would disappear from view, he would be gone again, and she couldn’t risk it.

So they traded breaths, and traded whispers of “yes” and “please” and “oh God,” rather than any of the words they might have wanted to utter instead, until the sun went back down, and once again Vissenta was lying awake, staring at Julian’s blissful smile and easy, shallow breathing, and asking herself again and again:

_How long until he leaves too?_


	6. When There's Nowhere Else To Run

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I've realized that I should probably throw in a note about how I'm envisioning the setting of this modern AU. I'm calling the city Vesuvia, but for the purposes of this story, it's a small city in the United States, based rather heavily on the one I live in. There's a diverse population here, largely because of the businesses and schools in the area, but it's still not as large a metro as, say, NYC. I'm doing my best to leave many details vague, so people can fill in the blanks however they see fit, but I still thought it might behoove me to clarify at least a little of the setting I'm picturing.

Julian knew he’d have to leave Vissenta’s apartment eventually. Realistically, he had his own business to attend to: finding work, for one, and finding more clothing than the single suitcase he’d brought back with him. Possibly finding somewhere else to live, though he had a feeling he had to find gainful employment first. He had so many things to do, so many responsibilities, and yet all he wanted to do was stay on Vissenta’s bed, and not let her go for anything.

Because if he let her go, he didn’t know if she’d come back.

Still, she had a life, a career, a whole host of things to do that he knew were all more important than staying tangled up with him in the sheets. She seemed genuinely apologetic, though, when she was gently shoving him out of her apartment the next morning.

“I’ve got to make sure the restaurant didn’t burn down while I was gone,” she said, smiling at him, brushing her fingers against his palm, doing all the small things that did nothing to dispel what he was certain was a false sense of hope. “You can’t say chef Vissenta made you breakfast if I’ve got nothing to be the chef of.”

He wanted to kiss her goodbye. She looked as if she might want it, too. They stood there for a moment, uncertain, and finally, Julian pulled away. He couldn’t risk it. He was risking too much already.

After he turned to go, he heard Vissenta call to his back when he was nearly to the bottom of the stairs. “I’ll call you!”

He paused and turned to look at her and flash a too-clever-by-half grin. “Is that what everyone does these days? I was ready to send my fastest pigeon.”

Vissenta pressed her knuckles to her lips, obviously suppressing a laugh. “Go home before Mazelinka sends a whole flock of pigeons after you.”

He still felt so light when he walked out the door, as he walked down one block, then another. But as the distance grew, something heavy descended on him, something familiar, the weight in his chest he always felt after one-night stands. The weight of knowing that the most he was good for was a good fuck, and wasn’t it his own fault? Didn’t he always crave those things, to touch and be touched, to be reminded that he was good for at least one thing?

He shook his head. He had to find some kind of work, if only to distract himself.

At the wedding reception, he’d run into Nazali again. They were delighted to see him, delighted to hear that he’d come back to stay, and informed him that if he needed anything, he could always give them a call at their office on campus. It was almost as if they knew he’d be searching for something to do with his time, and while normally he’d brush off what he thought was a cheap way to take advantage of good connections (because wasn’t he always leaning on connections? wasn’t he always failing to have the proper merits in order to earn his way?), the need for a distraction suddenly far outweighed the need to cling to his stubborn pride.

And so, within the hour, he found himself back in the halcyon halls of Vesuvia University, or at least in the ultra-modern, brand new biomedical sciences and engineering building that was still only in the planning stages when he’d left. Nazali’s office was easy enough to find, and he felt a sudden bout of melodramatic shame at the phrase “Dr. Satrinava’s office.” They’d gone to high school together. He might have been Nazali’s peer, rather than their friend desperately seeking a favor. He might have made something of himself if he hadn’t gone running away at the first sign of strife.

Nazali greeted him enthusiastically. “Ilya!” They clapped their hands on his shoulders, then pulled him into a bear hug. “You really are a sight for sore eyes.”

Julian laughed weakly. “I sincerely doubt that.”

“No, really!” Nazali pulled back, grinning. “Do you know how exhausting it is to talk to some of the people around here? At least I know you don’t take yourself too seriously.”

That hit a bit lower than Julian could have anticipated.

Nazali must have seen his wince, because their face softened and they patted his arm reassuringly. “It was a compliment. I promise.” They swept their arm to gesture at their surprisingly spacious office. “Coffee? Tea? Water? I’ve got just about everything.”

Julian nodded. “Coffee would be _fantastic._ ”

They both sat down after Nazali started an electric kettle and scooped coarse coffee into an enormous French press. “So,” they began. “Ilya. You know how much I respect you. How much I value your input, how great I know your work can be—“

Julian raised an eyebrow. “How bad is the job?”

Nazali sighed. “Tissue engineering lab. I’d say that I can’t pay anyone to work as the assistant, but we are literally trying to pay them. It’s part of the grad stipend. But no one can manage to stick it out. I don’t think there’s been an assistant in that lab for two years now.” They poured the boiling water over the coffee grounds and stirred it with a wooden chopstick from a stash of takeout utensils and gave Julian a look. “I think you know where this is going.”

Julian tried not to let his trepidation show, but he knew that he had a terrible poker face. “It’s Dr. Valdemar’s lab, isn’t it?”

Nazali jabbed the chopstick in the air. “Bingo.” They gently pressed the plunger on the coffeepot after a few minutes of silence, then poured a cup for themselves and for Julian. “The pay isn’t the greatest, and if you flake out on me, it’s my ass on the line for bringing in outside help.”

Julian sipped the coffee. He knew that Nazali used the best single-origin beans - these tasted like an Ethiopian coffee, fruity and rich - and that he should consider this a damn fine cup. But it wasn’t a cup from Vissenta’s old automatic drip pot, wasn’t in the stained Cafe Du Monde mug she’d given him yesterday morning, and if he’d been asked, he would have preferred whatever supermarket coffee beans she’d brewed to this cup.

Still, it was good coffee, and he wasn’t one to turn his nose up at such a thing.

He uncrossed and crossed his legs, fidgeting, delaying the inevitable. “Beggars can’t be choosers, I suppose.”

Nazali’s relief was plain as day. “See? I knew I could count on you.” They cocked their head, the white stripe of hair at the crown of their head falling forward. “Have you thought about coming back? Maybe not the med school, but…” They looked around the office. “This side of things isn’t so bad. I’m pretty fond of teaching these days.”

Julian shrugged, tried to look nonchalant at the notion, tried to conceal the longing and excitement at the idea. “Perhaps.”

Nazali’s stare was piercing, like it had been when the two of them were at the Vesuvia School of Science and Mathematics, when they took him under their wing and tried to teach him that his value was so much more than a grade point average. The lesson hadn’t stuck, of course, but they clearly still had a soft spot for him. “If you decide to try, you know how to find me.”

* * *

He waited for Vissenta’s call all afternoon. He wasn’t sure why he was waiting - wasn’t she at work? Wouldn’t that preclude calling him, of all people? Still, every few minutes, in between begging Mazelinka for another tutorial on how the washing machine worked and going over the hiring paperwork that Nazali had given him, he was glancing at his shiny new phone, at the generic background image of the lock screen, where all he could see was the time, and just how little of it he was able to spend without checking for a message notification.

_It will make a sound if she calls you, you know._

When the infernal thing finally made a dinging sound, he nearly dropped it. Thankfully, he did not, as he was certain it would not have survived the fall from his hand to the floor.

It wasn’t a call, but it was almost better.

He opened up a message from Vissenta, or rather, a picture. She was leaning up against something, facing the camera but looking to the side, her lips twisted in a tired smile and her eyebrows raised and a pile of dishes just behind her, over her shoulder. **The view from here,** read the accompanying text.

He wasn’t certain what he was supposed to do. Take a picture of himself in response? She’d seen Mazelinka’s house plenty of times. She didn’t exactly need to see that. He stared for a solid minute and a half, wondering what he should do, when she sent a followup text.

**This is when you send your own goofy selfie, dummy.**

He couldn’t help but laugh at that. He intentionally took a picture of just his eyes and hair, looking confused, with most of the frame taken up by the living room mantel behind him. **The pigeons had to take this one, I’m terribly sorry.**

The picture he received in response was of Vissenta’s middle finger.

He relented and did his best to take a flattering picture of his entire face, though he still felt awkward doing it, and sent it after a few minutes of deliberating, finally deciding that this was the best he was going to manage, and she’d have to just live with it.

**Glad to see you made it home.**

**I think this place is my home now. I live here. Have my mail forwarded to Selasi’s Cafe.**

Julian laughed, all the forms he’d been filling out forgotten. When was the last time he’d felt so easy talking to someone? When was the last time a conversation felt as natural as breathing?

_Friends. It’s called having a friend._

He shook his head. Those semantics could wait for analysis later. Still, he felt at a loss for how to respond. Thankfully, Vissenta brought the conversation to its neat conclusion.

**Time to yell at my misbehaving children before dinner service. Talk soon.**

With that note of finality, Julian pocketed the phone once more, his curiosity and anxiety at once sated for at least the rest of the evening, and stood up to drift into the kitchen. He thought he’d smelled something cooking, but apparently, what he’d smelled was Mazelinka heating up the meager leftovers from the night before to make her own dinner.

She looked up at him from the kitchen table and blinked. “Yes?”

Julian leaned on the doorframe. “I just thought there was something cooking, is all.”

Mazelinka huffed. “I’m not cooking your dinner every night.” She took a bite, then smacked her lips. “Learn to cook for yourself or get to the leftovers first, is what I say.”

Julian let out a long-suffering sigh. “Why do you insist on making me self-sufficient, Mazelinka?” He collapsed dramatically into another chair. “I thought I was your beloved grandson, come home after a long absence, in desperate need of your care and nurturing.”

Mazelinka squinted at him. “Glad to see you haven’t changed,” she said, her irritated tone still carrying something affectionate in its undercurrent. She tilted her head and took another bite. “Where did you sleep last night?”

Julian’s cheeks went pink. “So, ah, you noticed that?”

This was met with another huff. “I notice lots of things, fool boy.” Mazelinka waggled her fork at him. “You be careful. If you hurt that girl, you’ll have more than just me to answer to.”

Julian blinked, startled into bald-faced sincerity. “I would never.”

“So you say.” Mazelinka sighed and sat back. “She stayed here for a little while, you know. Up there in the attic where you’re staying now.”

Julian noticed that he was fidgeting again, and he did his best to still his bouncing knee and calm his quickening heartbeat. “She did, eh?”

Mazelinka nodded, suddenly looking her age, the lines on her face clearly etched in the fluorescent kitchen light. “After the unpleasantness with… well, Pasha was the one to get her from the hospital, and she brought her here. And I’m good at taking in wayward children.” She gave him a shrewd look. “You should know that better than anyone.”

Julian was still stuck on the word “hospital,” but he was afraid to pry, instinctively knew already that if he did try to ask, Mazelinka would balk and go tight-lipped on the details. He blinked, slowly, and met Mazelinka’s gaze. “I know.”

His adoptive grandmother nodded, then turned her attention back to the bowl of hodgepodge all thrown together from her cooking the night before. “Pasha’s always telling me about the dinners they serve at Selasi’s.” She peered at him, and her face split into a grin. “I can tell you aren’t going to cook for yourself tonight.”

* * *

The wonderful thing about living in Vesuvia’s downtown was how easy it was to walk to so many places. Even Mazelinka’s house, on the outskirts of what was considered the “respectable” part of town, wasn’t a terribly far walk from so many of the places Julian knew were the only places he’d really go for a good while. In the late summer light of the evening, the walk was actually pleasant, in fact. He wasn’t one to whistle, so he didn’t, but he certainly felt as if his step had grown jauntier.

Of course, the closer he got to the restaurant, the more nervous he became. What seemed like the perfect idea, back at Mazelinka’s - and at her insistence, really - was instantly the worst idea he’d had as soon as he could see the gentle glow where lights shone on the cafe’s signage. Wasn’t this too eager? Wasn’t this too much? Hadn’t he been told before that he came on too strong? He was coming on too strong. He was being too much. They’d been apart for hours, not even half a day, and here he was showing up uninvited at the place she worked.

There was still time for him to turn back. He could still do it.

Well, he could do it if he were a stronger man.

But as a man with a weakness, and a very specific one, Julian kept walking, one foot in front of the other, until he was standing at the door to Selasi’s Cafe.

As soon as he walked in, he saw a blur of bright blue that resolved itself into Natiqa, bustling about and running her finger down a computer screen at the host stand and murmuring to some young lady who, at the moment, looked completely baffled by whatever Natiqa was telling her. Natiqa sighed, but when she heard the sound of the door opening and closing, she looked up, and her face split into a wide grin at the sight of Julian.

“Welcome!” She held a hand out to him, and he took it, unsure of how to proceed, but Natiqa did the work for him and bowed theatrically over the back of his hand. “A distinguished guest!”

“Er…” Julian looked at the hostess, helplessly, but the young lady looked equally at a loss, and she gave him an almost comically nervous grin. “Natiqa, you flatter me, you really do.”

Natiqa elbowed the hostess. “He’s a very important guest,” she stage-whispered conspiratorially, and then turned her attentions back to Julian. “Come with me. I know the perfect spot. Best seat in the house, really.”

They didn’t have to walk far. Natiqa led him to the bar, just a few strides away from the host stand, and sat him at the very end of the polished wood horseshoe. He saw, then, that he had the perfect view into the window of the door that led into the kitchen.

Before he could say anything, Natiqa signaled the bartender. “A water for Mr. Devorak here, please, Jonathan. And don’t worry about a menu. I know exactly what he needs.” With a wink, she whisked away through the swinging kitchen door, and Julian could hear the strains of bright pop music from the busy space.

He could also see Vissenta. She was standing on the opposite side of the rest of the cooks, who were all busy behind stoves and grills and fryers, all putting plates of food up on the expanse of stainless steel that he recalled Vissenta telling him was called the line. She was standing there, all her attentions on the line, her hands moving at record speed as she read the tickets coming in off a printer next to her, and garnished the dishes that came up for her inspection, and stabbed spent tickets as soon as dishes left from under her careful eye. She was so focused, so in her element, and all he could do was watch in awe.

_God, she’s beautiful._

Not an appropriate thought, to be sure, but there it was, and he was going to keep having those thoughts, he knew it.

Natiqa waved to catch Vissenta’s attention. “VIP at bar 12!” She shouted over the din of the music, and Vissenta leaned over, her expression one of utter confusion. Natiqa leaned closer and presumably repeated herself, because Vissenta turned her head to take a look out the window and her eyes grew wide. Her cheeks immediately flushed rosy, and not just from the heat of the kitchen, and she smiled and actually bit her lip and waved at him.

_We’re both lying to ourselves, aren’t we._

His attention was diverted by the bartender, who brought over a glass of water and a glass of wine. “Natiqa said you’re here for the tasting menu,” the young man said. “Lucky you.”

Julian nodded, not sure what else to say. “Lucky me, indeed.”

And oh, how lucky he turned out to be.

The courses came out slowly, and he could see from his vantage point at the bar that each dish was carefully inspected by Vissenta, down to the last drizzle of oil or sprinkle of herbs, and each time she glanced up to meet his eyes and grinned hopefully. With each first bite he made sure to make a production of it, theatrically miming his deep appreciation, though of course, it wasn’t all for show.

The food was damned good.

He knew that the menu as a whole had Selasi’s stamp over it, a dazzling array of Levantine flavors and textures that Julian thought he already knew well. But every dish had a surprise to it, some element that was wholly unexpected, whether in the ingredients or the preparation or even the garnish, that let him know: Vissenta was here every step of the way, too.

Each course also came with a tasting portion of wine to pair, and halfway through, Natiqa swept by to quiz him on how many of the varietals he’d known. “This wine list is my firstborn child,” she said, lovingly holding up a leather-bound menu to show him. “If you tell me you’ve had them all before, I will cry.”

Julian took the last sip of a fascinating, complex orange wine that sat before him and shook his head. “If anyone’s going to cry, it’s going to be me.”

Natiqa smiled mischievously. “Should I send your compliments to the chef?”

Julian played along. “Oh, certainly. Tell your chef that this is the best meal I’ve had since breakfast this morning.”

Natiqa’s eyebrows shot up. “Breakfast, you say?” Her grin went sly. “A high compliment indeed.”

When she drifted off once more, Julian settled back in his seat, waiting for the next course, smiling to himself and stealing more glances at Vissenta as she moved around in the kitchen. She was deeply focused now, caught up in the crush of the peak dinner hour, and something about her intensity and ferocity made his heart beat even faster, faster than he’d actually thought possible. He was so intently focused on her own focus that he didn’t notice that the vacant seat to his left had been filled, until a familiar voice rang in his ear.

“Oh, hello, Ilya.”

Julian nearly dropped his glass of water. “Asra?”


	7. Emotional Motion Sickness

Vissenta always liked to joke that getting through a successful dinner rush was better than sex. In many cases, it absolutely was better than lots of sex she’d had. She could ride the wave of adrenaline from the barely-contained chaos of the line for hours, whereas most of the orgasms she’d had in her life were quick, efficient, and soon forgotten. Tonight’s dinner service, though… that turned out to be something a lot more complicated. As if the whole thing was better than sex, yes, but only because she spent the night sneaking glances out - and, what’s more _cooking for_ \- the person responsible for what had so far been very memorable sex.

More than memorable, actually.

There was something else to the time she’d spent with Julian. Something in her that felt laid bare, something so utterly terrifying that she should have been running away from it at the first available opportunity.

_Well, I did try to run away._

But they kept gravitating back to one another.

She felt dizzy, lightheaded, almost intoxicated, except that rather than fall victim to the sluggishness of too much alcohol, she found that the more of Julian she drank in, the more clear everything became. Clear and radiant. Fucking _sparkling_ , actually.

 _Kind of like good coke,_ she mused to herself. But even coke had a comedown, and so far she hadn’t come down from… whatever this was.

It was on this effervescence that she sailed out of the kitchen with the final course in hand - cardamom beignets, dusted with cinnamon-coffee powdered sugar, with a demitasse of deep, rich cocoa for dipping - and came up short to see Julian looking like he was about to be physically ill.

Well, to be more specific, Julian staring at Asra as if he was going to be physically ill.

Years of customer service kicked a switch in Vissenta’s brain, and she immediately swooped in to interrupt whatever tense conversation - or lack thereof, from what she could tell - was happening with a cheery “Ta-da!” She sat the dessert plate down and leaned her elbows on the bar, smiling at them both.

Asra looked fully at ease, though “at ease” seemed to be his default expression most of the time. He smiled at Vissenta warmly. “Oh, those look delicious.” He pushed the plate over ever so slightly closer to Julian with just his index finger. “You really should try these, Ilya.”

Julian looked down at the sugary pillows of dough, then at Vissenta, then at Asra. At that same moment, a small reptilian head poked out from behind Asra’s neck. Julian blanched. “Is… is that snake supposed to be in here?”

Asra shrugged. “She can do what she wants.” He reached up a finger to scratch the indigo snake under her chin, then gave the beignets a pointed stare. “Are you going to eat all of those?”

“Of course he is.” Vissenta turned her thousand-watt grin directly onto Asra, baring her teeth and widening her eyes in warning. “These are the final course on the tasting menu tonight.”

Abruptly, Julian slid out of his seat. “I’m sorry, I have to… ah… that is… I need to find—“

“Around that corner and to the left,” Asra said, pointing in the general direction of the main dining room.

Without another word, Julian practically bolted from the bar. Vissenta watched him turn the corner towards the restrooms, frowning, and turned back to Asra. “What is going on?”

Asra tiltedhis head, one snowy-white curl of hair falling over his eye. “I would assume it’s because he and I… you know.”

Vissenta blinked. “I thought everyone knew about that?”

“But does _he_ know that _you_ know that?” Asra surreptitiously nicked a beignet from the plate, now that Vissenta’s attentions were turned elsewhere, and she didn’t have the heart to stop him. After all, they weren’t nearly as delicious when they got too cold.

She sucked in a breath, then let it out slowly. “Ohhhhhh.”

Natiqa ambled by, cocking an eyebrow at Vissenta, and the two of them briefly disappeared into the kitchen. “What happened with Gingersnap?”

It took Vissenta a moment to catch on to what Natiqa meant. She frowned. “What do you mean, what happened?”

The other woman shrugged. “He came to find me, asked to pay up his tab, and when I told him it was on the house, he shoved some cash at me to give Jonathan and he was out the back door.” She peered at Vissenta. “Was the food _that_ bad?”

Vissenta spluttered. “What? How could you _say that_?”

Natiqa smirked. “I’m fucking with you. But just so you aren’t disappointed when he doesn’t come back… he’s left the building.”

With a sigh, Vissenta turned back to the door to the bar. “Mother _fucker_.”

Back at the bar, Asra was finishing up his first beignet. He held his sugar-coated fingertips up to Faust, who flicked her tongue to lick them clean. “As I was saying. Considering the current situation, I would assume this is something he needs to know that you know.”

Her cheeks burned hot. _Dammit_. “What situation?”

Asra picked up another beignet. “How long have we known each other, Vissenta?” He took a delicate bite of the pastry, then graciously accepted the teapot and mug that Jonathan brought him from the kitchen. “Ooh, I’ll take the Earl Grey this time, thank you.”

Vissenta folded her arms. “I dunno. A while?”

“Good enough.” Asra took two teabags from the box that the bartender helpfully proffered, then dropped them into the small pot of steaming water. He dipped his beignet into the cocoa. “And in that time, when have you ever missed taco Tuesday?”

 _Shit_. “That was yesterday?”

Asra smirked. “You know it was. And I didn’t mind. More for me and Muri.” He gestured at her with the last bite of beignet in his hand. “So don’t play dumb.”

With a sigh, Vissenta leaned back down on the bar. “Okay. Fine. I might have had… company.”

Asra picked up the third and final pastry. “Company that I can tell you, from experience, has a long and glorious tradition of…” He waved the beignet around, spilling snowy sugar on the bar and into his lap. “Crafting his own narrative.”

This earned a dry laugh from Vissenta. “Oh, do tell.”

Asra licked his fingers clean. “Ilya Devorak is his own Byronic hero,” he said, finally pouring himself a cup of tea. He raised an eyebrow at Vissenta over the rim of the mug. “You have to smack him out of his own head every once in a while.”

Vissenta snorted. “What, is he that much of a masochist?”

Asra closed his eyes at his first sip of tea and smiled. “You could say that.”

Vissenta felt her face go hot again, along with other parts of her. “…oh.” She wiped her hands on her apron, suddenly nervous and fidgety. “I need to get back to the kitchen. Start breaking things down. Go do… my actual job.”

There was that infuriatingly serene smile of Asra’s again. Inscrutable. A cat lapping the cream. The very definition of “ineffable.” He blinked violet eyes at her and took another sip. “Don’t wait around for me. Just let me know when you plan on missing another taco Tuesday.”

* * *

The first person Vissenta texted wasn’t Julian. Somehow, she didn’t think she’d get a response. So, she texted Mazelinka. **Is Julian home?**

Mazelinka always took a while to respond, but she still replied relatively quickly.

**THOUGHT HE WAS WITH YOU**

After another minute, Mazelinka sent a string of emojis, including the winking face, the smiling devil face, and a heart, along with a few that Vissenta assumed had nothing to do with the question at hand. Unless Mazelinka was communicating in her own special code, which wasn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility.

Vissenta smiled, in spite of the knot of anxiety in her stomach. In her opinion, one of Portia’s greatest accomplishments, that was also her greatest mistake, was teaching Mazelinka what an emoji was and how to use it. **Don’t worry, I’ll get him home in one piece.** Still, she groaned inwardly. _Does everyone know?_

 **ONE PIECE, TWO PIECES, I CAN STITCH HIM UP.** Followed by a skull emoji.

God bless that woman.

And so, as she checked over the kitchen and only half-listened to Jonathan shooting the shit with Hector and Eleazar behind the line, she shot off the next logical text, to Sander. **Is my friend from the other night there?**

Sander was nothing if not prompt, in spite of being one of the busiest bartenders in the city. **Tall, depressed, with fluffy red hair?**

Vissenta sighed with relief. **That’s the one.** She frowned. If Julian was at the Raven, and had been for at least - she glanced at the wall clock - an hour, that didn’t bode well for his current state of sobriety. **Can I get you to cut him off soon?**

 **I’ve been giving him angostura and soda with salt for 30 mins now _,_** came Sander’s reply.

Oh thank God. Sander’s Sober-Up Juice, is what Vissenta called it, and it had saved her ass more than once on a late night when she was drunk enough to get fooled into drinking it.

 **If you weren’t married I’d kiss you on the mouth** , Vissenta tapped out. She noticed, suddenly, that the steady stream of chatter in the kitchen had died down. She looked up to see Hector, Eleazar, and Jonathan all looking at her expectantly. “What?”

“We’re going to the Raven,” Hector said. “You coming?”

Vissenta smiled. “Guess so.”

At this hour of the night, when most every restaurant in Vesuvia had closed its doors, the Raven stayed open, a beacon to those in the service industry who all wanted nothing more than to eat cheaply and drink even cheaper. PBR flowed like water, appetizers were half price after 10 pm, and Vissenta knew exactly where she’d find her Byronic dumbass.

Sure enough, he was sitting at the end of the bar, staring morosely into a bright red drink that he likely didn’t know was composed of very little actual alcohol. When she tapped him on the shoulder, he started and nearly dropped his drink. “Vissenta!”

She flashed Julian a wry smile. “Did dessert look that bad?”

Julian ducked his head, shame painted on his face, and he shrugged. “It certainly wasn’t my finest hour, was it?”

Vissenta sighed. “Come on. We’ve got a lot to catch up on.”

Julian opened his mouth, presumably to protest, but Vissenta cut him off at the pass. “I’ve settled up with Sander. Now, you come with me.”

She noted, with some curiosity and with no small degree of… excitement? That when she told Julian exactly what to do, he did it. It was another one of those intoxicating feelings, the sort that made her feel like she was tripping on air, but she knew that was a conversation for another day, with less booze involved.

Well, maybe a little bit of liquid courage, but not this much.

She took him by the elbow and led him out of the bar, out to the patio, past the table where her coworkers had settled in and gave them a nod. “Sorry kids. Mom’s gotta get home early tonight.”

“Ahh, chaca chaca!” Hector and Eleazar crowed and saluted with their beers, and even Jonathan smirked, but Vissenta just rolled her eyes and kept pulling Julian along the walk to her apartment.

Maybe another night. But not this one.

* * *

Vissenta filled a glass of water and sat it down on the counter. “Now. You sit here, and we talk.”

Julian looked at her with a mix of fear and shame, his face burning, his forehead in his hands and his shoulders slumped forward. Vissenta had parked his ass in one of the two barstools next to the countertop - a purchase her sister Marcelie had made, as a housewarming gift, and Vissenta hadn’t had the heart to tell her that she never expected to entertain anyone in this sad excuse for a living space, but was suddenly glad she hadn’t rejected the gift - and he was now frowning down at the cheap laminate surface. “Not much to say,” he mumbled.

With a deep sigh, Vissenta leaned against the lower counter where she normally did her meager cooking prep, on the rare occasions she was home to cook for herself. “Asra’s been my friend for a long time,” she began.

Somehow, this seemed to make Julian look even more miserable. He did take a sip of water, though, which Vissenta found encouraging. She continued.

“So I know about…” She waved her hand. “The two of you.”

Julian’s gaze snapped up to meet hers. “You do?”

Vissenta jerked one shoulder up. “I mean. I know the two of you fucked around. I know it didn’t end well. And that’s the most Asra’s told me.” She bit her lip. “That’s the most I’ve really ever needed to know.”

Julian sat back and folded his hands together over his chest. There was a long pause, and he stared into the middle distance, and Vissenta resisted the urge to prod him further. _If he’s gonna work this out, he needs to do some of it himself._

Finally, Julian spoke. “I was… selfish.”

When Vissenta slapped her hands on the counter, Julian sat up with a jerk, his eyes gone wide in shock, and he stared at her. She scowled at him. “Selfish is what Vincent calls me all the time. Selfish is the word I get to hear when I want to do anything that isn’t for my fucked-up family.” Her lips twisted into a nasty sneer. “So maybe save that bullshit, and try again.”

She’d certainly startled Julian into something, even if it wasn’t total sobriety. He unlaced his fingers and rested one hand on the higher countertop, looking as if he might reach for her, but thought better of it and reached for the glass of water instead. He took another long drink. “I’m not proud of myself. Or what I did.” He stared down into the glass for a moment, then back up at her. “We… we used each other.”

Vissenta sighed, leaned forward to rest her head on her fingers, rubbed at her temples. “Isn’t that what everyone does, though? Use each other?”

Julian’s response was almost too soft for her to hear, but she heard it anyway. “I don’t want to use you.”

Her gaze snapped up to meet his. His light gray eyes were wide, unwavering, and his expression made him look so… young. So lost. So scared and hopeful all at once.

She had a feeling she looked the same way, when she was with him.

Vissenta tried for a smile. “I don’t want to use you, either.” She stood up straight and reached for his hand, laced her fingers with his. “I really don’t.”

Julian smiled, then, something hangdog in his expression, but still with the traces of hope, with the traces of sincerity, with the traces of something Vissenta longed to feel for herself. “Thank you.”

She couldn’t help herself. She gave his hand a squeeze, then let go, afraid to fall too far forward, afraid that if she said anything else she would skid uncontrollably into that comedown, and she wasn’t ready to fall, not yet. “I’ll call a cab.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...yes that was a salty bitters joke in there, if you know where to spot it.


	8. Good God, Let Me Give You My Life

On Thursday morning, Julian woke up alone for the first time in two days. He’d woken up alone for the majority of his adult life; this was not new. But somehow, this did feel new, felt like something was missing, some _one_ was missing, because he hadn’t ever woken up next to someone quite like Vissenta. And he missed her. The day before, in her apartment, he’d been the first to wake, and she’d ended up with her face nuzzled against his neck, the rest of her pressed up against him, and the sensation had been so wonderful he didn’t even mind that his right arm had fallen asleep beneath her.

Now, he was alone in the attic room at Mazelinka’s, wishing his right arm was numb again.

He must have been lucid enough last night to set an alarm, because his phone was trilling obnoxiously in his ear. When he picked it up to silence it and possibly throw it out the window, he saw a message from Vissenta.

**Maz told me you made it home. Sleep well. Text me in the morning.**

His head fell back on the flat pillow and he stared at the dusty, cobwebbed skylight above him. He remembered Asra, and the immediate despair and panic he’d felt, and going to drink about it rather than man up. But he also remembered Vissenta coming to find him, and the way she’d looked into his eyes when she told him she knew, and the way she’d held his hands in hers even after he confessed to what he thought was one of his greatest sins.

For a Jewish-born atheist, he certainly felt an inordinately large need to confess to sins.

He looked at the phone again. Looked at the message. Considered the wealth of possibilities for a reply, from flippant to self-flagellating, and he typed them out and deleted them and wondered how he could possibly express how he felt. Finally, he decided on two words.

**Thank you.**

By the time he’d stumbled out of the shower and won a valiant struggle with Mazelinka’s stovetop espresso pot, he felt the phone buzz. He nearly dropped it - that was becoming a habit, he needed to learn to calmly extricate the damn thing from his pocket - and was just a little disappointed to see that the message wasn’t from Vissenta, but from Nazali. **Lunch meeting with Valdy at 11:30.**

Right. Work. The thing he’d found in order to properly distract himself from the five foot four spitfire who’d consumed nearly all of his waking thoughts for the past three days. He leaned against the kitchen counter on his elbows, running his hands through his still-damp hair, and tried his best to focus on how to survive a meeting that would involve watching Dr. Valdemar consume food.

_Wonder if they even eat food, or just the hearts of failed grad students._

As he ruminated on this particularly unpleasant prospect, he felt his phone buzz once more. He almost didn’t want to look at it, but curiosity won out, and he was glad that he had.

**The view from here,** Vissenta had sent, with a picture of a large plastic cutting board on which a very sharp knife, a cup of coffee, and a very put-out looking fish head were artfully arranged.

A weight he hadn’t known was even there lifted, the relief washing over him in a gentle wave, and he smiled. Just… smiled. He hadn’t smiled so much in so long, and here it was, coming to him every single day.

He sent her a picture of the Moka pot in reply, then resolved himself to keep his phone in his back pocket for the rest of the morning, so as to adequately prepare for what was sure to be a horrifying midday meeting.

He made it all of about twenty minutes.

Julian hadn’t known that sharing these little details of life could be so fascinating. God bless modern technology, really. He wished he could say all these things to Vissenta in person, of course, but given her work and his need to make himself useful elsewhere, this really was the next best thing.

**The view’s improved** , she said, sending a picture of her tired but smiling face.

He wanted to memorize every line of that face, and he was grateful for all the ways she was giving him to look at it, even separated by responsibilities. He supposed he ought to return the favor, though he felt foolish doing so.

They sent these sorts of messages all morning, casual conversation, absurd faces, all the small intimacies he didn’t know were even possible for him to have in his life. (He still didn’t believe he deserved it, but he could pretend to deserve it, couldn’t he?) Even getting through lunch with Nazali and Valdemar - the former kept up the cheerful bulk of conversation, while the latter barely touched their food and tilted their head at Julian in that unsettling manner he suddenly remembered vividly from his time as a student - was more bearable with the knowledge that he was going to have something to tell Vissenta after.

**Valdemar’s still there? I remember taking their bio class and fearing for my life.**

Julian laughed to himself as he answered, and they were talking about their respective time as students, and for a brief moment he worried that they might run out of things to talk about. What would they say when they sat down in the same room again? Would they have nothing else to say? Would they resort to that tangle of bodies again, and could this last at such a pace?

But still they kept sending the messages, and he thought that maybe they might simply pick the conversation thread back up as easy as breathing when they saw each other again. _If? No, when_.

On Friday, Nazali noticed Julian’s rather frequent phone activity. They didn’t peer too closely at the screen, but they did say, lightly and unobtrusively: “Must be someone special.”

“What?” Julian’s face grew hot. “Er, that is to say, no, it’s just… it’s a friend.”

“Mhm.” Nazali passed over another folder. “Just a little more paperwork, and then you’ll have the coveted position of tissue engineering lab teaching assistant.”

Julian blinked, shook his head, then nodded. “Of course. Highly coveted.”

On Saturday, it felt as if all Julian did was send Vissenta pictures of the birds outside the attic window. **The pigeons have turned into crows** , he said, and then began to make up elaborate stories about the corvids.

Vissenta played along, asked for details of the birds’ relationships, grew entirely too invested in a storyline he ended up concocting about one crow’s jealous husband and her dashing secret lover. Several bad puns were made with the word “murder,” most of them on Vissenta’s part, and Julian was so delighted he didn’t even realize that he was hungry until the sun was starting to set and he could smell Mazelinka cooking something downstairs.

An entire day talking to Vissenta without actually talking to her. He was giddy again. _Giddy. Really. Giddy at age thirty-seven_.

Downstairs, Mazelinka was standing at the stove, uncovering a steaming, shallow saucepan full of stuffed cabbage. She turned when she heard him walk into the kitchen and pointed at the cabinet. “Set the table, please.”

The two of them sat down to a meal that Julian hadn’t had in years, and he went back for second helpings, then thirds. “Mazelinka, have I told you just how wonderful your cooking is? Spectacular. Amazing. You should cook every night.”

Mazelinka narrowed her eyes. “You still haven’t figured out how to cook, have you?”

Julian tried to look nonchalant. “Whatever do you mean?”

This was answered with the jab of a fork that came uncomfortably close to his eye. “I don’t cook on Sundays.”

When Julian retreated back to the attic, he took a deep breath and decided to take a chance.

**Seems I have to feed myself tomorrow night.**

Vissenta didn’t answer immediately. He didn’t expect her to, really; at this point, he’d already learned when she was most likely to respond, and when she was probably busy with her work. Still, it didn’t ease the low-grade anxiety until he finally saw the phone’s screen light up in the darkness.

**Didn’t you learn to cook at some point?**

He couldn’t tell if this question was serious, or if it was teasing, and so his response was a little of both. **Could burn water trying to boil it.**

**Well, you’re in luck** , Vissenta replied. **I’m offering an exclusive cooking lesson tomorrow night.**

* * *

He felt like he was on a first date.

First of all, he spent longer than usual staring at himself in the bathroom mirror, staring at the circles under his eyes and the crows feet in their corners, wondering if he was too old for all of this. Wondering if he was delusional, if he was reading the whole thing wrong, if Vissenta just thought of him as the occasional good lay, because always, always, always, he was just the good lay. The one who provided a good time. The one who put everyone else’s needs before his own.

But then he thought about her hands on his. About the peculiar callouses right where her fingers met her palm on her right hand, callouses from holding a knife, he supposed, and how she curled those fingers around his, and how this had to be more than just someone using him.

She’d promised, after all.

And he promised her.

His wardrobe was still distressingly sparse, a problem he’d hoped to remedy but hadn’t found the time to, in between his crash course on the latest biomedical technologies and the stream of messages with Vissenta. He had no time for anything else. And so he finished buttoning another white shirt, tucking it into another dark gray pair of trousers, sliding his feet into the well-worn Chelsea boots that had taken him from Lithuania to London and back again, and he was out the door.

The walk to the house that held Vissenta’s apartment was pleasant, just as pleasant as his walk to Selasi’s the other night. He resolved that this time he wouldn’t fuck up nearly as badly.

For starters, he hope to make it through the night mostly sober.

That was a new feeling for him. Drinking was a friend, a constant companion, a way to ease himself into the world, because to show himself without the excuse of intoxication was to truly show _himself_ , and for once…

For once he wanted to show himself.

He halfway considered tossing a rock up at Vissenta’s window, until he realized that he might not even hit the correct window, and that he’d be stuck out here on this sidewalk looking like a fool with a pocket full of pebbles while Vissenta waited and waited to hear from him. So, he called her instead.

“Be right down!” She sounded breathless, and he wondered if maybe she felt the same way he did.

He hoped so.

She opened the front door of the house, grinning and pink-cheeked, and he saw that she was in a dress again. It didn’t have a row of buttons down the front, like the dress she’d worn to dinner at Mazelinka’s just under a week ago (had it only been days? He felt like he’d lived a lifetime already), and it was clingier, and it was shorter, and he tried not to look at her legs, tried to keep his eyes down as he followed her up the stairs to her apartment.

When he closed the door behind him, she was already at the kitchen counter. “So, I thought we could learn one of my favorite ‘I’m out of ideas but there’s eggs and pasta’ dinners,” she said, grinning at him. She held out a package. “And I even got turkey bacon!”

He was confused for a moment. “You… what?”

Her smile faltered for a split second. “I just… you didn’t eat the bacon the other day. I thought that maybe…” She shrugged. “Maybe it was a pork thing?”

He hadn’t even consciously realized that he’d pushed the bacon aside when she made him breakfast. It wasn’t an aversion, just… a habit. Old habits that died hard. And he still hadn’t found the appetite for it, really.

Julian smiled. “Such attention to detail.”

Vissenta beamed. “I didn’t get to be Vesuvia’s new chef to watch by ignoring stuff like that.” She sat the package back down on the counter. “So. Pasta carbonara.”

Ah. Not entirely outside his realm of experience. “So where’s the cream?”

At this, Vissenta pressed her hand to her heart. “You dare!” She gave him a theatrical wink. “Cooking lesson number one: food is science.”

He couldn’t help but stand back, enthralled, as she twisted and danced her way through the small kitchen space. She was so comfortable here, just like when he’d watched her at the restaurant, and he would have been content to watch her work like this, but the spell was broken when she handed him a knife.

“Have you ever diced an onion?” Vissenta sat a cutting board on the counter and laid a large onion on it, then picked up another large knife. “Here. Let me show you.”

She pulled him around the counter, into the kitchen, and held her hands over his as she carefully demonstrated. She pushed his fingers into position, curled them under so only his knuckles were exposed to the slicing of the steel. “When you cut yourself in the kitchen,” she said, “most of the pain comes from the shame of knowing you could’ve mitigated the damage.”

At the moment, the only feeling he knew was her hand over his, and the way she stood a foot shorter than him but still made him feel secure as she wrapped her arms around him to guide his hands. “Come on,” she said. “You do it.”

He didn’t do a half bad job, in his opinion, though Vissenta’s affectionate smirk said otherwise. “Practice makes perfect,” she said, grinning up at him.

“I will dice a hundred onions,” he declared, and he really meant it.

As the lesson went on, she continued to flit around him, to swoop in only occasionally, to guide his hands as she explained the mechanics of what was happening.

“It’s an emulsion,” she began, cracking eggs one-handed into a large mixing bowl. “Here, you whisk these. No, whisk them! Put your back into it!” She poked at his forearm. “I know you’ve got to have a good jackoff muscle, so use it!”

Julian must have blushed, because Vissenta’s laugh rang out, bright and brash. “Now, as for the pasta…”

He only half listened as she explained to him the importance of starches, of how to turn oil and water into something entirely new, of how timing was everything as she twirled the long strands of spaghetti, grated cheese over the whole dish, used whatever strange alchemy she possessed in order to turn all these ingredients into something that he actually desperately wanted to eat.

And eat they did. Vissenta prodded him with her elbow, sitting on the bar stool next to him and looking up expectantly. “Think you’ve got a handle on how to do it?”

For once, Julian was given to complete honesty. “You might have to show me again.”

There was that laugh again. She shook her head, grinning. “I think it’s time to open up the wine.”

They kept eating, lapsing into companionable silence, sipping the pinot grigio that Vissenta opened and poured for them both into clean coffee mugs (“I don’t trust myself with wineglasses,” she said to him, apologetically, and he didn’t mind, he didn’t mind at all), until she spoke up once more.

“So, Ilya.”

His given name sounded so strange, coming from her, so strange and so right. He looked at her, curiously. “What?”

Vissenta stared into her mug of wine. “I mean…” She looked up at him, almost sheepish, and lifted her shoulders in a small shrug. “Maybe I looked up the name Ilya?”

Oh, this was going to be interesting.

Julian cocked his head at her. “You looked up the name Ilya?”

Vissenta didn’t seem to blush much, but when she did, Julian thought it was the sweetest sight. She stabbed her fork into her pasta and twirled. “I was just curious!” She chewed, thoughtfully, clearly hoping he might fill in the blanks, but when he didn’t, she sat her fork back down and shrugged again. “I mean, if you were gonna go by the English version, why not Elijah?”

Julian leaned back in his seat, suddenly pensive, suddenly aware that he would have to reveal some more of himself if he wanted to answer Vissenta’s questions. “When you’re a child coming to terms with everything going wrong…” He trailed off, stared at the wall, then stared at his plate, really just stared at anything that wasn’t Vissenta’s inquiring gaze. Still, he had to meet her eyes sometime, and when he did, all he saw was steadiness. Patience. Waiting.

It gave him to strength to keep going.

“Elijah was a prophet,” he said. “Beloved by God, as it were.” He waved one hand, unsure of how else to continue. “Coming to a new country, when everything you knew was falling apart and your parents were running away, and then…”

There was Vissenta’s hand on his again. He wanted to lean into the touch, wanted to duck his head down so she could stroke his hair, but he stayed upright, stayed as distant as he could manage, even when she whispered softly to him: “And then losing your parents.”

He tried to smile, tried to put on that all-knowing, loftily intellectual smirk, but he couldn’t quite manage it. “And then losing everything.”

Vissenta gave his hand a squeeze. “So why Julian?”

He couldn’t find an answer. “Why Vissenta?”

“Ha!” She sat back, poured herself another few fingers of wine. “You’re awfully good at deflection.”

Julian took the bottle and topped off his own cup. “Julius was the last pagan emperor of Rome.” He raised an eyebrow at Vissenta. “As far from ‘beloved by Yahweh’ as a Jewish kid can get, really.” He raised the mug. “Now, your turn.”

Vissenta sighed. “After three daughters, Vincent desperately hoped his wife would finally have the son he’d always wanted.” She sipped from her cup pensively. “Then I showed up, and he insisted on at least pretending I’d met his expectations.” She raised her mug in a toast. “To family disappointments?”

Julian tapped her mug with his. “To family disappointments.”

* * *

They cleaned the dishes together, a scene so oddly domestic, and yet Julian felt as if it was so right. Felt as if the two of them were meant for this.

There was a word he wanted to say.

He couldn’t say it. Not if he wanted to keep this. Not if he wanted to avoid fallout.

Almost awkwardly, they both perched on the edge of her bed, and she finally glanced sidelong at him. “There’s something I’ve been curious about.”

He had a feeling of where this might go, and yet didn’t know for certain, and so with trepidation he answered. “And?”

Vissenta chewed on her bottom lip for a few seconds, then straightened her spine. “Do you like for someone else to call the shots?”

Oh, this was in dangerous territory indeed.

Julian leaned forward, elbows on his knees, unsure of how to respond. “How do you…”

“I mean, we’ve all got our issues,” Vissenta said. She crossed her arms and stared at the floor. “We all get inside our own heads, yeah?”

Oh, she had him pegged.

He leaned back now, trying to project the air of confidence, trying to act as if this line of questioning wasn’t terribly dangerous for him, as if they might go down a road they could never turn back from. “I’m afraid you’ll have to elaborate, my dear.”

The endearment made her flush pink, and he almost had time to appreciate that observation, but then she spoke again. “I mean… well, at least on my side of things, there’s Catholic guilt and repression.”

He wasn’t sure how to respond. Thankfully, she continued.

“I just…” She ducked her head, looked into his eyes. “I want to try things.”

His heart sped up. This was new. This was unprecedented. This was too good to be true. He had to play dumb. He couldn’t let her know. “What things?”

She pushed up from the bed, moved to one of the barstools, perched up there and sat with her legs almost indecently held wide open, to the point where he was certain it was on purpose. “Will you do what I tell you to do?”

_Oh, fuck._

He had to collect himself. He had to make sure this was all right. He couldn’t just jump right into it, not if he wanted any hope of maintaining the balance, not if he wanted the chance to do it again. “I need you to… I need you to be more specific.”

Vissenta took a deep breath. “I don’t want you to feel used,” she began.

_But I want to feel used._

Instead, he nodded, did his best to look encouraging, did his best to stay level. “We’ve talked about this already, haven’t we?”

She nodded. “But I want you to tell me. I want you to tell me what you want.”

_Fuck._

He was done for.

Julian ducked his head, looked up at her beneath his lashes, bowed his shoulders in supplication. “I want to make you feel wanted.”

Her sharp intake of breath was enough for him, but he waited, he waited for her to verbally assent, and she did, because that’s who she was, because she was Vissenta Senadz, and whether _she_ knew it or not, she was the one in command and control. “I want to be wanted.”

That was all he needed. “In this way…” He wanted to clasp his hands together, wanted to turn his palms upward, wanted to come begging on his knees to her, but instead he said the words. “I want you to use me.”

And apparently that was all she needed.

She cocked her head to one side. “Take off your shirt.”

He went to unfasten the buttons, hastily, but she shook her head. “Slowly. I want to enjoy it.”

Well, Julian was nothing if not a showman.

He looked her in the eye, maintained the steady contact as he slowly ran his fingers beneath the placket, slid each button free from its fastening deliberately, and when he pulled his shirt open, he reveled in the way she gazed upon him, delighted in the way her eyes traced every inch. He ran his thumbs along his waistband. “Should I continue?”

Vissenta leaned back, opened her legs wider, curled her lips up as she continued to stare at him. “Not yet.” She nodded downward. “Make me come.”

_Oh, fuck._

He was on his knees, he was before her, he was reaching up her legs when she reached forward to swat at his hands. “With your mouth. Hands behind your back.”

_God fucking dammit_.

He was rock hard. He couldn’t focus. But he could focus, he could look up at her and see her looking down at him, her gaze hot and intent and something entirely new, and he wanted to please her, wanted to make her feel wanted and desired and worshipped.

Here he was again, ready to worship her. Worship at her feet, worship at her cunt, worship at every quivering inch of her, ready to declare her a deity, ready to renounce his shaky grasp on atheism, if only because he’d found a goddess.

He wanted her to call him Ilya.

He wanted to be her beloved.

But first, he had to worship.

He clasped his hands behind him and he canted forward on his knees, awkward and messy and desperately human as he caught the waistband of her underwear between his teeth, tugged down, ran his cheek against her thigh, and he felt her foot press into his shoulder to give him better leverage while keeping him low, keeping him beneath her, and he tugged at the garment between his teeth, pulled down until she lifted her hips to help him and there she was. There she was, fully before him, still tantalizingly hidden in the shadows beneath the hem of her dress but just visible enough, just so he could see her, dusky pink and glistening and open, so open, and he recalled the offerings.

He was the burnt offering. He was the sacrifice. He was bound, in every way but physical - and they might broach that subject soon enough, he could only pray - and like Isaac he was laid bare, his heart flayed open as he looked upon the divine.

And now, for lack of a grain offering, he would feast.

He kissed, he nipped, he supped, he buried himself between her, he listened to every moan that escaped her lips and he responded in kind. He ran his tongue between the folds of her, tracing every line, delving deeper with each pass until the tip of his tongue was inside of her, and when she gasped out _higher_ he tilted upward, tracing circles around her, lapping gently at the cleft of her, giving her only what she wanted.

_Shelem_ was the peace offering. He met her halfway, held back from what he really wished to do in order to follow her directives, in order to work the straining bud of her until she was panting and grinding against him.

Because he was the sinner, he was the supplicant, and he had to cleanse himself before her, make himself pure, and to make himself pure was to serve, was to set himself aside.

He didn’t want to think of this as the guilt offering.

And still, he felt guilty. He felt guilty in how much he wanted from her, how much he had taken already, but here she was taking back from him, and maybe, just maybe, he could feel free of the guilt at last.

His hands were still obediently clasped behind his back, and instead he ate of her, drank of her, and when she finally grasped him by the hair and pressed herself into him, he was at peace. He was tracing every quivering inch of her, feeling the way she shifted, lapping up more and more of the slickness of her, and he worshipped.

“Ilya,” she breathed above him.

Whether she knew it or not, he was her beloved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> alexa play "take me to church" by hozier


	9. I Get Delirious Whenever You're Near

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we've had so much angst that I wanted to give us all some fluff as a treat, uwu

Vissenta woke up slow and lazy, stretching her arms and legs, cracking her joints as she yawned, reaching automatically beside her, in a motion that was suddenly common and comforting, in the span of mere days. A week ago, she wouldn’t have gone searching for that gently rising and falling chest that was dusted with hair that tickled her nostrils as she drifted off to sleep. She wouldn’t have expected to see that aquiline nose in profile, or the curved lips below, or the deep-set eyes above. She wouldn’t have been thrilled to lace her fingers (burned, scarred, rough) with those long, elegant ones that made her shiver when they cupped her jaw, splayed across her lower back, gripped the muscle of her thigh. But now… now she reached for all these things and more.

But the space beside her was vacant.

She sat up, heart hammering, and looked wildly around the apartment. There wasn’t much of anywhere else for Julian to go: the bathroom door was hanging wide open and the room itself clearly vacant, and she didn’t see that familiar tousle of auburn out on her small balcony.

She felt as if she’d been doused with a bucket of ice water, and she crumpled back in on herself. He was gone. He left. He left like everyone always did, and she should have known better, she should have expected this, she should, she should, she should…

All she knew to do now was curl back up beneath the sheet and squeeze her eyes shut and try not to cry. Try to remember the ways she was supposed to breathe, in these moments, the ways she was supposed to center herself and ground herself, but all she could feel was his absence, and so her breathing constricted, her face went hot, and she dug her short fingernails into her palms to leave angry red half-moons, because that was all she could feel now, all she knew was the sting—

Her phone buzzed at her from its spot on the floor.

She started, then twisted to look over and down.

She’d never admit it to Julian - _Ilya_ \- that her favorite picture of him from their silly “view from here” messages was the very first one, when he pretended to not know how a selfie camera worked. She’d set it as her contact photo for him, and now those gray eyes and quirked brows stared up at her from the buzzing phone screen.

She snatched the phone up to answer it, doing her very best to school her voice into something that did not sound like she’d been ready to start bawling into her pillow. “Hi?” Dammit. She sounded squeaky and strangled.

“I’m sorry Vis, I forgot that this front door needs a key.” Julian’s voice instantly pulled Vissenta back down to earth, back into her body, back to a place of reason and reality, and she could have punched herself in the arm for almost spiraling out like that when she hadn’t done it in so long.

_I’ll just have to punch him in the arm instead._

“I’ll let you in,” she replied, then ended the call without so much as another word. Yanking her jersey-knit dress over her head, she fumbled with the doorknob for a second, and she blinked and scrubbed at her eyes and tried again, and she was down the stairs like a shot.

Julian stood on the front porch with two cups of coffee balanced in one hand. He was grinning, obviously pleased with himself, but the grin fell when he saw Vissenta’s face as she opened the front door. “Vissenta?”

She shook her head. “Come on up.” Immediately, she turned and practically sprinted back up the stairs, leaving Julian to fend for himself and not get locked out once more.

Inside her apartment, Julian immediately went to sit the coffees on the counter by the kitchen and went to her, put his hands on her shoulders, rubbed her arms and pulled her close and pressed his lips on her forehead, right at her hairline. “Vissenta, darling, I was coming right back.”

All of Vissenta’s previous, murderous musings on jabbing her knuckles directly into Julian’s deltoid evaporated, and she mostly just felt foolish, standing there as he went from rubbing her arms to running his palms up and down her back, and yet. And yet she leaned into the touch, felt as if she might feel that kiss to her forehead for all time, started to close her eyes and tilt her face further up towards his.

He hadn’t left.

Not yet.

“Sorry,” she mumbled. “Put that one in the ‘Vissenta-is-batshit-crazy’ file along with all the rest of it.”

Julian pulled back, just enough to look down at her. “Well, that makes you extraordinarily lucky, because I’m fairly certain I have my own file like that floating around somewhere.”

This time Vissenta did give him a punch, though it was gentle, and the clutching of the grave wound she bestowed was all theater on Julian’s part. She couldn’t help her snorting laugh. “I’m a dumbass for not getting coffee beans before I had company over.”

“And I’m a dumbass for not leaving you a note,” Julian replied.

They sat side-by-side on the bed and sipped their coffee, and Vissenta felt everything circle back around to that sparkling feeling she’d felt a few nights ago, and it was no less bright. But still, she’d been so afraid. She didn’t want to give someone the power to make her feel so afraid. She never had.

But then, he’d made an honest mistake, and if he had the power to make her feel afraid, his greater power was to come back and make her feel…

Not _safe._ Safe wasn’t the right word. She’d never felt in danger.

He just made her feel… not alone.

She leaned her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes. “I’ll just have to tie you down to the bed to keep you from disappearing again.”

Julian’s breathing was suddenly very careful, and very measured, but Vissenta could almost feel his heartbeat picking up speed, where she was pressed up against his side, and she felt like she had the night before. Like she’d unlocked something, seen into the secret chamber of Julian’s heart, seen _Ilya_ , and like she held the whole of him in her two hands.

She hoped she wouldn’t accidentally break him in two. At least, not break him any more than he might want her two.

She turned her head slightly, and she could see the bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed very carefully before speaking. “It’s certainly an option.”

Warmth flooded her down to her core.

Then, she had an idea. It was probably another item lifted directly from the Vissenta-is-batshit-crazy file, somewhere under the abandonment issues tab, but she didn’t care.

She stood up and went to a small wooden bowl that perched on her windowsill. She dug to the bottom, past the loose change and old receipts and other detritus on top, until her fingers closed around the prize she was seeking. She turned around and held up the small ring on which two keys dangled. “The spare keys.”

Julian’s eyes widened slightly. “The what?”

Vissenta tossed them to the bed, where they landed beside Julian with a gentle thump. “In case you ever…” She could feel her cheeks warm. “If you have to run out, and need to get back in. Or… crash here when you’re on this side of town late at night.” She crossed her arms, suddenly shy. “You know. Emergencies.”

Slowly, Julian picked up the keys, turned them over in his hand, looked down at them with an expression close to wonder, and then smiled. He pocketed the keys and turned that soft smile up at Vissenta. “Of course. Just in case.”

* * *

Unfortunately, Julian did have to leave for the day. Vissenta hadn’t even been aware that the semester was starting this week, all her old academic rhythms long forgotten, but Julian shrugged apologetically, even sadly. “I just got this job,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “Losing it this soon would be a new record, even for me.”

Vissenta had been possessed by whatever madness had also inspired her to give him her spare keys as she leaned up to brush a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “I’ll see you at dinner.”

She didn’t have the slightest idea what was coming over her.

Well, she had at least an inkling of an idea. The sort of truth that waits quietly at the back of one’s mind, patient, biding its time, as the conscious mind ignores it for as long as possible.

She was good at ignoring these things for as long as possible.

Instead, she found distractions. The first was to go out for more coffee, and take a walk, just to keep moving. What she didn’t expect to happen was that her feet led her back to the old neighborhood, back to the historic district of grand houses, where the cemetery lay at its heart, and where a Queen Anne house with a massive wraparound porch always drew her inexorably in.

And so, she found herself knocking on her sister’s door.

Marcelie didn’t answer, which Vissenta expected, as Marcelie was surely in her upstairs office by now, hard at work. But Marcelie’s wife Celeste did answer, and she beamed at Vissenta before pulling her into a warm embrace. “Vissenta! Sweetie! Oh, we’ve missed you!”

Celeste pulled Vissenta in by the hand, and Vissenta had no choice but to follow the statuesque blonde woman through the foyer and into the living room, where Celeste and Marcelie’s son - Vissenta’s nephew and godson - Rémy was playing on the floor. He was still a chubby thing, all baby rolls and sweet cheeks, not even walking yet, but sitting up and crawling, and Vissenta could have sworn that Celeste had only just brought the boy home from the hospital yesterday.

“I’ll be right back with tea,” Celeste said, ignoring Vissenta’s half-hearted protests and waving of her paper coffee cup.

Left alone, Vissenta crouched down to hold her hand out to Rémy. “Young man,” she said, and the tow-headed baby grasped her fingers and immediately tried to gum on them. “Have you been behaving yourself? I’ll be very disappointed if you have.”

“He’s a wonderful sleeper but a terrible napper,” Celeste said as she sailed back into the room, bearing a tray with a full tea service. “So he’s only half disappointing.”

Vissenta couldn’t help but accept the cup that Celeste offered her, and she took a polite sip. It was excellent tea. The best money could buy. Everything in this house was the best money could buy. But she certainly couldn’t hold that against Celeste. “I’ll allow it.”

With a smile, Celeste folded herself down gracefully to sit on the floor with Vissenta and Rémy. “Now, what brings you here? We haven’t seen you in ages.”

“I can come visit my favorite sister-in-law and my godson whenever I want, can’t I?” Vissenta sat her teacup back on the tray.

“Not usually, no.” From the wide, high-arching entryway between the living room and the main hall, Marcelie strode through. “Morning, Vissenta.” She sat, but on a loveseat, looking down affectionately at Celeste and Rémy before turning a cunning gaze on Vissenta.

It took everything in Vissenta’s power to not roll her eyes up at Marcelie like they were teenagers again. “You know, I really could have come just to talk to Celeste, Marcie.”

Marcelie was busy pouring her own cup of tea and once again leaned back, one wide-trousered leg crossed carelessly over the other, her Oxford shirt starched to sharp precision. “Well, don’t mind me, then.”

Just then, Vissenta’s phone buzzed against her chest, where she’d stuffed it into her bra. She pulled it out, ignoring Marcelie’s rolling eyes and Celeste’s affectionate smile, and saw a message from Julian. **The view from here.** Only half his face was visible, eyes wide in a pantomime of fear, with the pinched face of Dr. Valdemar over his shoulder, staring into a microscope and oblivious to their cameo in Julian’s selfie. Vissenta snorted and bit her lip, grinning down at the phone like a moron, when Celeste’s voice brought her back to reality. “Who is it?”

“Oh!” Vissenta hastily stuffed the phone back into her bra. “No one.”

Marcelie and Celeste exchanged a glance while Rémy burbled and busily chewed on his own toes. “What’s her name?” Marcelie’s question was blunt, to the point, just as she’d always been since they were children.

_Oh for fuck’s sake._ Vissenta did her best to not fold her arms and stare petulantly at the floor like a kid, but she couldn’t help twisting a strand of hair around her finger as she answered. “You remember Portia, right?”

Marcelie raised an eyebrow. “You mean you’re a homewrecker now?”

“What? No!” Vissenta sat up straighter and shook her head. “No, oh God no. It’s…” She leaned back on her hands and stared up at the vaulted ceiling. “It’s Portia’s brother. Julian.”

“Oh my God, Celeste, she’s gone heterosexual.” Marcelie’s words rang with mock disappointment, but her face was pure, wicked glee. “You must have it bad, to be blushing like that.”

“I’m not blushing!” This was, of course, a lie. Vissenta didn’t need to see herself to see that she was probably the same shade as the heirloom tomatoes still coming in by the case at work. “And I mean, it’s nothing.”

Celeste reached over to pat her knee. “Of course it is. Absolutely nothing.”

Vissenta couldn’t keep up the pretense any longer. She sighed. “I gave him my spare keys.”

“Ah!” It was Celeste’s turn to grin now, and she exchanged another one of those knowing, secret looks with Marcelie. “She’s not entirely heterosexual, dear. This must be the bisexual equivalent of the U-Haul.”

Marcelie roared with laughter, and Celeste chuckled, and soon, Vissenta couldn’t help but join in. Even Rémy began to laugh, a hiccuping, gurgling sound, and Vissenta reached over to tickle his belly. After a few minutes, Marcelie finally wiped her eyes and leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “So, when do we get to meet your new boyfriend?”

Boyfriend.

God, that was certainly a word.

Vissenta made a face. “I’m twenty-nine years old, Marcelie, I think I’ve moved past the need for boyfriends.”

“Oh, come on.” Marcelie squeezed Celeste’s shoulder and smiled at her wife with such open affection that Vissenta almost hurt to see it. “I still like to call Celeste my gal pal when we’re at those stuffy lobbyist dinners.”

Celeste gave Marcelie’s fingers a light kiss. “My very best girlfriend.”

Vissenta really did revert to full teenager mode then, pointing her finger into her open mouth and gagging. “You two are disgusting.”

She paused to look at the three people before her. Her sister, her sister-in-law, her godson. They were a family, and they were happy, and she ached for it so suddenly, so acutely, and the sober look on her face must have been clear as day, because Celeste let go of Marcelie’s hand to lean over and wrap her in an embrace once again. “Just let it flow, sweetheart,” she said, stroking Vissenta’s hair, and Vissenta took a deep breath and hugged her back. “Just let it flow.”

* * *

Let it flow, Celeste had told her. Let it flow, Marcelie agreed. So what did it mean? What was she doing? Could she simply just… have this? Vissenta ruminated on the walk to Mazelinka’s, her dress swapped out for a slightly more demure jeans and t-shirt combination, the warm, rosy glow of the setting sun casting her shadow long and thin along the sidewalk.

She’d made this walk countless times before, always with Portia, always to go back to the place that felt more like her home than the house she’d grown up in, but now she walked into something more. Now she would go there and see Julian - _Ilya_ \- and they would bear the weight of something new between them, would exchange the same kinds of knowing glances she’d seen on Marcelie and Celeste’s faces over lunch, and she knew they would because they already had. It was easy, it was too easy, it was so gloriously easy and natural and maybe she was overthinking this. Maybe she needed to go back to therapy and have someone tell her she was normal. Then again, perhaps a therapist would tell her none of this was normal, and all her illusions would be shattered.

So she kept walking.

She’d never knocked on Mazelinka’s door before, and she wasn’t going to start now. She walked in to the comforting smell of Mazelinka’s cooking, and the sound of music playing from a tinny-sounding speaker that Mazelinka refused to trash because, as she said, she didn’t trust the Bluetooth ones, instead preferring a frayed aux cord. It was all like home again, all so comfortable, and Vissenta slipped back in to her Monday evening self like she was slipping into her favorite sweatpants.

_Wheels get locked in place_

_Stupid look on my face_

Mazelinka was in an eighties mood tonight, it seemed. Vissenta walked in to see her dancing off-rhythm and off-kilter to Prince, waving her omnipresent wooden spoon about like it was a conductor’s baton. “Maz!”

Mazelinka turned around, not missing a beat, if one could call the cadence of her movements a beat, and grinned at Vissenta. “Good to see you!” She gestured upwards with the spoon. “Go get that fool boy out of the attic, I don’t know what’s taking him so long.” And then, to Vissenta’s mortification, she winked. “And don’t take too long yourself.”

_Everyone really does know._

She’d walked up to this attic room a thousand times, it seemed, but none of those times involved her heart beating quite like this. When she cracked the door open, she could see Julian standing with his back to the doorway, pants on but shirt still off, apparently deliberating on which shade of gray to wear down to dinner. He had one hand in his hair, and for a moment Vissenta let herself marvel at the lean muscles of his back, and the smattering of freckles across the smooth, pale planes of his shoulders, and the way his pants rested along his hips, absolute and utter lack of ass notwithstanding.

The rest of the back view more than made up for that deficiency.

Reluctantly, she knocked on the door. “Hey there.”

Julian whirled around so quickly he nearly stumbled over and fell onto the bed. He grinned sheepishly, another one of those blushes of his spreading over his cheeks, and Vissenta very much wanted to kiss those cheeks, kiss his jaw and his neck and really, everywhere but his mouth.

The dip where his neck met his collarbone.

The line of his sternum.

The trail of hair down his abdomen, and she realized with a start that she had yet to return the many, many favors he’d done for her between her thighs, and resolved that she would show him some of the same attentions soon.

They stood and stared at one another like that for a moment, and it seemed as if neither of them wished to break the spell. Vissenta moved first, like she always did, making her way deeper into the room, and she stopped just short of closing the last six inches or so of distance between them. “Been a while.”

Julian smirked, then. “Eight whole hours without you, my dear, and I suffered every minute.” To Vissenta’s great disappointment, he decided on a shirt to wear, and was buttoning it up before she had a chance to reach out and touch the bare skin of him.

She sat down on the attic bed instead. “I used to stay up here, you know.” She didn’t know where this came from, didn’t know why she felt the need to go into all of this, but then she remembered her words to him less than a week ago.

_Best friend information._

_I call her my best gal pal,_ Marcelie’s voice rang in her mind, and Vissenta blinked. There had to be a difference, though, between friends and… whatever other kinds of friends.

_Boyfriend_.

She almost wanted to taste the word in her mouth where he could hear, but she held back.

Julian sat down on the bed next to her. “Mazelinka told me.”

Vissenta leaned back to stare up into the skylight, now gone dark in the twilight hour. “Did she tell you why?”

She felt Julian’s fingers lace with hers. “Mazelinka is loyal to a fault.” When Vissenta turned to give him a quizzical look, he tilted his head and raised his brows. “She wouldn’t tell me for anything.”

_Best friends,_ she told herself.

_Boyfriend,_ she said a moment later.

She blinked a few times. “Well.” She went back to staring up at the dark panes of glass above them. “I had a little bit of a nervous breakdown. Just, you know, a smidgen of one.” When Julian’s only answer was to squeeze her fingers, she took a deep breath and kept going. “Vincent thought sending me away would be the most efficient solution. I never called him when I was in there.” She took a deep breath, blinked, and still, she kept going. “But I called Portia every chance I got. And she and Mazelinka showed up and caused so much hell that I think my discharge was just so they’d leave the hospital staff alone.”

In all of this, Julian was still quiet, and Vissenta had to look over to make sure he was still awake. He was, and his gaze was so sad, so sweet, that she couldn’t bear to look for too long. “And so I stayed here,” she finished. “Wasted misspent youth, or something, all in this attic.”

Finally, Julian spoke. “Is the attic… a bad place for you?”

Vissenta shook her head fervently. “Absolutely not.” She did her best to give him a smile. “Everything about this home reminds me of the good that still pushed through the bad.”

He simply smiled back at her, and there was the feeling again, there was the temporary madness, and the words spilled out like a dam had broken.

“So what we’re doing, here.”

Julian’s face fell, and Vissenta scrambled, because the sight of it made her heart hurt, and she suddenly had an idea of what he must have felt this morning when he came back to the apartment from his coffee run, and she reached out to stroke his jaw with her fingers. “Would you believe I told my sister today that I have a boyfriend?”

There was that fucking word again. So juvenile. So… inadequate. But the smile that slowly spread across Julian’s face made her nearly forget all of that. He raised an eyebrow, back to smirking. “Ohoho, did you now?”

Vissenta leaned closer and pressed a chaste kiss to his lips. “I might have.”

He took her face in his hands, then, and suddenly the juvenile words felt correct, because here they were necking on a twin bed in an attic, or would be soon, if Vissenta had anything to say about it.

Julian parted his lips slightly against hers, and she held back from immediately plunging her tongue forward and instead matched the motion, feeling the soft, curving shape of his lips instead, taking in small breaths every time he sighed, gently tilting her head and even smiling a little.

He was sweet, he was eager, he was holding himself back and waiting for her permission, and she gently ran the backs of her fingers against his jaw, feeling the lightest graze of stubble there, and she stroked one thumb along the jut of his cheekbone, and he groaned softly into her.

Vissenta finally, slowly traced along the seam of his lips with her tongue, and he opened his mouth further to meet her, to taste of her himself, and everything around her suddenly felt so hot, suddenly felt so warm, and still her first reaction wasn’t to pull away but to get closer. To lift herself up, plant her arms on either side of his head, gently run her fingers through that gently curling red hair, and he groaned again and ran one hand against the small of her back.

It was a spot that, apparently, sent her into full-body chills, the sort of shake and vibration that’s almost too much to bear, and still she held on, let him take his time, all as they gently explored one another’s lips, and tongue, and even teeth, until they were both panting, squirming messes.

“So is that what we are,” Julian whispered, almost too low for her to hear it, but Vissenta could hear, and she wasn’t sure how to answer the question any better than she was answering it at the moment, and so she melted into him instead, hoping he might not ask again, and that seemed to be enough.

A loud, sharp rapping from the floorboards beneath them interrupted their rather important test at hand. “Hoi! Not in my house you don’t! Come down for dinner!”

The finally broke apart, both laughing, and Vissenta couldn’t stop looking at the way Ilya laughed when he was completely at ease. It was different, something so far removed from the smirks he doled out to everyone else that she wondered if maybe she was hallucinating. She shook her head and stood up and reached for his hand. “Together?”

Julian nodded. “Together.”


	10. Whatever Words I Say

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do I know Russian? No. Am I doing my best to use it correctly here? I mean, as well as I can. Please feel free to correct if you know more than I do.

In the past half decade of his life, Julian hadn’t known or much cared for repetition and routine.

One could argue that the regular cycle of one night stands and nightly binge drinking was, in itself, repetitive, with all the false comforts of routine, but he did not want to resolve himself to accepting this just yet, did not want to settle for that life now that he knew he could perhaps have a better one.

And that was the terrifying, thrilling part of it all.

He _could_ have this one.

He could have dinners with his grandmother and his… girlfriend? Awful word, really. But the leap from this, this _thing_ they had, to the greater possibilities that were supposedly the natural progression (at least, ignoring the heartbreaking alternative), that was a large leap indeed.

_Girlfriend it is then._

He could have these nights where his heart was half full instead of half empty - _getting sentimentally cliché now, aren’t we -_ and where he didn’t have to plow his way through a bottle to make everything bearable. He could feel Vissenta’s fingers brush his beneath the table as she laughed at Mazelinka’s grumbling, could catch her eye and see her smile and perhaps even _return_ the smile. He could have these things and not have to earn them.

That wasn’t to say the whole night was soft and sweet, though he might have actually been happy if it had been. When they took their night from Mazelinka’s to the Raven for a drink, and Vissenta took him around the back to shove him against a dimly-lit brick wall and flash him a coy grin before dropping to her knees, he knew nothing with Vissenta would ever be soft, it would never only be sweet, and he welcomed the complexity, the richness, the _oh god oh god oh god oh fuck I’m gonna—_

When she stood back up and tucked his hair behind his right ear and lightly kissed him on the cheek and took his hand to lace her fingers with his and walk into the bar as if they’d simply been out for a chaste evening stroll, just _boyfriend and girlfriend_ , he wanted it all, and he wanted to _deserve_ it all, and he would do anything it took to keep it.

Even avoiding saying the words that already tripped through his mind and threatened to break free every time he looked at her, but from somewhere so deep that the phrases weren’t even in English, and instead they came to him in the language he’d learned at his mother’s knee.

“Spending the night?” She asked him this so _shyly_ , for all the things they’d already done.

_Ya khochu byt' s toboy_ _,_ he thought.

“You still have to ask?” He threw the full force of the flirt into his reply, slipping back into a performance, almost, because he had to think of this as such, if he wanted to keep his head above water and keep from drowning in the straits of sincerity that had shipwrecked him in aborted relationships past. He fell too hard, too fast, he knew this, and he had to tread carefully, had to hold himself back if he wanted to keep her.

But it was as if she could prod him further, open him up before her, in spite of the care he wanted to take, in spite of knowing how this would end for him if he wasn’t careful. He could feel the words, taste them, hear them rushing in his head like the rushing of his blood, gone so hot, gone so dangerously _passionate_ when she pulled him through her doorway, kissing him all the while.

“Do you want to make me feel good?” She breathed this into his ear from above him, her hands in his hair while his rested on her hips, as they lay on her bed and she kissed him like her life depended on it and he kissed her like he couldn’t live without her.

_Dushe nastalo probushdene,_ he thought, because he lapsed back into cliché, he lapsed into _Pushkin_ for God’s sake, but his soul was awake now, his soul was awake and Vissenta had seen it whether she knew it or not, and _I serdtse byotsa v upoyene,_ he was skipping lines now, the lines of the poem jumbled in his mind, and he had to find something else to say—

“I’ll be good,” he said. “I’ll be as good as you want me to.”

And so they fell into a routine that was anything but routine, anything but rote, and yet it was _rite_ , and he was devout, somehow, devout for the first time in decades, and he knew he was falling, he knew he was gone.

_Ya ne mogu zhit' bez tebya,_ he thought when he looked at her.

_Ya tebya lyublyu._

* * *

After a week, Julian was spending three nights a week at Vissenta’s place.

After two weeks, Julian couldn’t believe they were halfway through September already, on the cusp of autumn, and that he hadn’t managed to spectacularly screw this all up. In fact, he still felt giddy at the smallest things, almost to a point where he felt as if he were getting away with something. _Surely feeling this good can’t last._

_It never does, after all._

Still, he held on as tightly as he could. Because if he _was_ getting away with something, then he had to hold on to what fleeting moments he was given. And every moment felt fleeting, no matter how many times Vissenta smiled at him, no matter how many nights he stayed with her, no matter the weighty presence of that pair of keys he still hadn’t used because as soon as he did… as soon as he did, that is when this would evaporate. As soon as he did or said what he wanted to do or say, this would all be gone.

After three weeks, Pasha and Nadia finally returned from their long, luxurious honeymoon, and they joined the Monday night dinners post-haste.

It was Monday again, and Mazelinka’s house felt suddenly smaller, suddenly cozier, with five of them around the dinner table instead of three, with his elbows brushing up against Nadia’s on one side and Vissenta’s on the other as Pasha cackled with delight at something Mazelinka said. All of a sudden, he felt like an intruder, as if this was a ritual conducted many times without even the thought of him, and that his presence was not entirely welcome now that Nadia and Pasha had returned.

(Selfishly, he sometimes thought of them as the intruders, thought of them as the ones who’d interrupted something private and special between he and Vissenta, thought of them as the reminder that he had to earn this life to live. These thoughts were almost always chased by the familiar dull ache of guilt, and he wasn’t sure what was worse.)

_Heart half full._

They all sat in Mazelinka’s living room after dinner, with a second (or third, maybe) bottle of wine to pass around, and as Pasha and Vissenta gently bickered about what TV show to put on and ultimately ignore in favor of their own conversation, Nadia turned to look at Julian. “You look well,” she said, pouring herself another glass of pinot.

Julian took the bottle from her when she offered it. “If by alive, then yes, you could say that I look well.”

Nadia shook her head and sipped. “No. You look happy.”

Julian didn’t quite know how to answer. His gaze wandered over to Vissenta, who at this point was very irritably arguing with Pasha over whatever cooking competition show Pasha had put on. His lips twitched up in a smile when he saw the way she gestured at the screen, deadpanning a rant he’d heard her go on at least once before about the sheer idiocy of every contestant who used the ice cream machine. When he looked back to Nadia, he saw that she had her own smile on her face, one he remembered from their days at the Vesuvia School of Science and Mathematics (“S&M,” its alumni affectionately called it, and he perhaps could blame _that_ for the path his adult life ended up taking). “What?”

She shook her head. “Like I said. You look well. And we’re happy to see it.”

Julian nearly spluttered into his wine. “We? Who’s we?”

Nadia let out a gentle laugh, or something like one, and she patted Julian on the shoulder. “Portia is glad you’re back for good.”

It took a tremendous effort for Julian to not look as pained as he felt at these words. “Is she, really?”

The look of affection Nadia gave him was too much to bear and he looked away after only a fraction of a second. “You’ve always had a family here, Julian,” she told him. “We are all happy for you. Really.”

He wanted to argue, wanted to protest, wanted to inform Nadia that there was no way they could possibly be happy for him, and that he didn’t deserve that sort of… that sort of _forgiveness._ But then Vissenta collapsed in his lap, the back of her hand pressed to her forehead and a theatrical look of suffering on her face, and he was in _her_ world again, and all thoughts of waiting for the other shoe to drop were pushed to the back of the line once more.

“Please save me,” Vissenta sighed. “Your sister insists on watching shows that a _stress me the fuck out._ ”

Without a second thought, Julian leaned forward to kiss her upturned palm where her hand lay on her forehead. He could see Nadia’s raised eyebrows and smirk out of the corner of his eye, but that was easy enough to ignore. “Well then, perhaps I should walk you home so you can get some rest.”

“We know what you’re going home to do,” Pasha said loudly from the other side of the room. She rolled her eyes when Julian began to stammer. “Oh come on, Ilya. Get out of here before Mazelinka swats you with the broom.”

* * *

Monday nights were Mazelinka’s, but Tuesday nights were wholly theirs. _Tuesdays_ were theirs, a dreamy day where they barely left the apartment and barely wore clothes for the duration. It was another thing that Julian found so unbelievable, something he could never have dreamed of, and he didn’t want to let go of it for anything. He didn’t _want_ to leave these five hundred square feet, could live here indefinitely if it meant clinging to happiness. He pretended not to see the quiet disappointment flit across Vissenta’s face when she tried to take them outside, even just for a short walk, because she stayed, she stayed, and that was what _mattered._

Vissenta still tried her best to teach Julian how to cook. He had to give himself at least some credit; after being made to slice and dice all manner of root vegetables and aromatics each time, he’d actually begun to do so decently well. Of course, he didn’t want to let on to this rate of improvement. He much preferred to feel Vissenta’s hands over his as she instructed and demonstrated, and to see her smile and laugh as she hip-checked him out of her tiny kitchen in exasperation. Then he could watch her, wholly uninterrupted, and watch the one-woman dance she did as she worked what even his mostly rational mind could only describe as magic.

Tonight she’d cleared as much space as she could manage, in order to roll out dough. He’d been surprised to see that she owned a pelmenitsa. “Well, after eating pelmeni at Maz’s house and trying to make them totally by hand, I broke my no unitaskers rule,” Vissenta explained. She draped the second layer of dough over the first, which had been dotted with spoonfuls of filling, and rolled her scarred, well-worn French pin over the setup to press the pelmeni through. “Come on, you aren’t off the hook. You’re gonna shape these fuckers.”

Julian feigned a disgruntled pout, shoving his lower lip out so comically that it made Vissenta burst into giggles. She leaned across the counter to give him a kiss, then catch his lower lip between her teeth and give it a tug. He let out an involuntary groan and felt his face grow warm and reached for her, but she leaned back and shook her head.

“If we start _that_ , we’ll never finish dinner,” she admonished. “Now get your skinny ass over here.”

Seemed to him that _she_ was the one who started it. Nonetheless, Julian complied, circling around to the other side of the counter and picking up a dumpling. “If you keep feeding me like this, my ass won’t be skinny for much longer.”

“Ooh, promise?” Vissenta gave said posterior a swat, leaving a flour-dusted handprint across the seat of Julian’s pants. “I’d love to have more to grab on to.”

Two could play that game. He dropped the pelmeni in his hands, task once more avoided, and spun Vissenta to face him. “You have more than enough for both of us,” he teased, taking hold of her backside, which was, in fact, generously rounded and perfect for him to grip to hoist her up so her could bring her face to his and nibble at her bottom lip in retaliation.

Vissenta shrieked. “What did I just say?” Still, she crooked her elbow around his neck, her rolling pin still in her hands, and leaned in to kiss him properly. “I’m getting you back for that,” she murmured when they finally parted, and she raised her notched eyebrow at him. “Now put me down before I whack you with this rolling pin.”

“Mm, promise?” Julian couldn’t help but steal one more kiss before reluctantly putting Vissenta’s feet back on the floor. When he turned his attention back to the pelmeni, his fingers fell to a practiced motion that he remembered from the single task Mazelinka entrusted him with in her kitchen.

Vissenta paused, spooning more filling entirely forgotten, and she gaped up at him. “I thought you didn’t cook?”

Julian shrugged, looking at her even as he continued shaping the small dumplings. “I wouldn’t exactly call this cooking.” He nodded at the bowl of filling. “And what are we putting in these?”

Vissenta was still watching his hands, her eyes wide, her cheeks gone suddenly pink. She blinked and turned back to placing filling in the dimpled first layer of dough. “Did a little experiment with the smoker at work,” she said. “I wanted to make andouille, but with beef. And there’s a small batch of mushroom here, too.” She covered the pelmenitsa once again, rolled to push the dumplings through, and pushed them over to Julian, who’d already shaped the first batch with ease. “You’re, uh…” Her cheeks blazed again. “Nimble fingers, there.”

“Oho,” Julian answered, enjoying the sight of Vissenta growing flustered for a change. “Should we see what else I can do with my fingers?”

“Not until you’ve washed your hands,” Vissenta retorted, and she turned back to roll out another circle of dough.

They worked in tandem, with Vissenta filling the pelmeni and Julian shaping them, and when they’d finally amassed far more pelmeni than the two of them could eat in a single sitting, Vissenta shooed him back to his seat on the bar side of the counter. “I don’t trust you to make espagnole,” she said, and she turned to the stove to bring a pot of water to a boil and toss a knob of butter into a saucepan.

As always, Julian was in awe of the food Vissenta placed in front of him. He took a bite of the chopped melange of pickled and cured vegetables that Vissenta had used to garnish the pelmeni, swirled them with the garlicky sour cream she’d mixed up to dollop on the side, and was, as he tended to be when confronted with all these dishes of hers, at a loss for words. “What _is_ this?”

Vissenta smiled as she prepared her own shallow bowl piled high with dumplings. “Just a little tribute to the women who taught me how to cook.” She took her first bite and closed her eyes in bliss, muttering snatches of something in what _sounded_ like French, but that Julian only half understood. “I think Mama would be proud,” she finally said in English. “Once she got over the fact that it’s not pork andouille.”

Julian took a long pull from the bottle of beer that Vissenta had sat in front of him along with his dinner. “You know, I don’t have any ethical or moral objections to eating pork. Certainly not religious.”

Vissenta tilted her head at him. “I mean… I just assumed?”

Julian shrugged. “Old habits, maybe. But if it’s part of a dish, not on its own, I’ll certainly eat it.” He took another bite, chewed thoughtfully, swallowed, and smiled at Vissenta. “Especially if you’ve made it.”

Vissenta grinned back. “Oh thank God. I’ve got a red beans and rice recipe that’ll change your life, and I just could not make it in good conscience if I didn’t use my own pickled pork.”

“Your cooking could change a lot of lives,” Julian replied. When he saw Vissenta open her mouth to disagree, to deflect, he shook his head and interrupted. “I mean it. I haven’t forgotten what you told me before, about your, ah…” He knew the correct word, but he couldn’t resist the blatant mistake. “Brassiere?”

“ _Brasserie._ ” Vissenta only pretended at being irritated with him; he could see the way her eyes shone up at him, the way they betrayed her, and he wished she could open up and be as vulnerable as she seemed to want to be, as vulnerable as he felt with her.

_Hypocrite._

Vissenta stabbed a dumpling and dipped it in the swirl of sour cream and deep brownish-red sauce - espagnole - that puddled at the bottom of the bowl. “Tiqa keeps telling me that if I can get a decent business plan drawn up, we could go to her parents again for the investment. That maybe I’ll have enough of a name for myself now after working for Selasi.”

Julian reached for her free hand and covered it with his own. “Sounds like a sure thing to me.”

Vissenta shook her head. “Lightning doesn’t strike twice.” The look she gave him was sad, and he ached at the sight, and he squeezed her fingers, he wanted to make all that sadness go away, but he didn’t know _how._

She continued. “Can’t fail if you don’t try, right?” She shrugged, still staring down at her food. When she looked back up, she was blinking rapidly, but she was grinning again, the grin that Julian had quickly learned meant that she was done being vulnerable, was done wallowing, was done talking about the subject at hand. “Eat up. You’re gonna need your strength tonight.”

* * *

Washing up took far longer than necessary. Julian was always ready to lend a hand where he knew he couldn’t mess everything up, but standing next to Vissenta was still too much of a temptation, even with a task set before him. He kept stopping to brush up against her, to lean down and kiss her forehead, to splash water at her when she protested, delighting in the shriek of laughter she always let out as she splashed back, and they were soon a laughing mess together, the chore forgotten. “Fine, we can do this later,” Vissenta said, like she always did, though she still insisted on putting away the food before they found more interesting ways to pass the time.

Tonight would prove to be far more interesting than Julian could have expected.

He was already halfway to bliss as he lay back on the bed, his shirt long forgotten on the floor and his neck already blooming with bright red marks as Vissenta worked her way down his torso. He arched his back and gasped when her teeth grazed his nipple, and his fingers dug into her hips so he could better grind up against her.

“You’re getting handsy,” Vissenta said, lifting her head up and giving him a wicked, glinting look that made him bite hs lip and grind into her again, this time actually pulling her along.

She sat up and back on her heels, prying his hands away from her, but she still had that smile on her face. She shook her head, slightly. “I’d like to see you not be able to use those hands,” she said, her voice gone low and husky.

He groaned and let his hands fall to his sides. “And how do you suppose we’ll do that?” He ran his fingers along her calf, gently, gingerly, both hoping she would let him and that she’d tell him to stop.

Vissenta shifted off of him. “You know, I thought about that.” She was at the head of the bed now, poking around beneath the mattress, pulling something from between the mattress and the box spring. “Lack of bedposts means I can’t tie you to the bed, right?” She produced what she had been looking for: a strap, apparently affixed beneath the mattress, with a clip on the end, and her grin grew wider, more wicked, a thing Julian hadn’t thought possible. “But I know the most helpful sex shop owner.” More digging, this time in the bottom drawer of her bedside table, a place Julian hadn’t looked into yet and still couldn’t see from his prone position, but he heard _quite_ a few things moving around in there as she shifted them aside to find the prize. He shuddered. He hoped he could experience everything in that drawer one day.

She sat back on top of him, straddling him, smiling down at him, her hands behind her back. “Oh, you want it, don’t you,” she breathed. “You didn’t even move to see what it was. You’re always so good.”

All Julian could do was nod as he worried his bottom lip between his teeth. He was holding his breath, he realized, though it all came out in a rush and a moan when Vissenta brought her hands around to show a pair of padded leather cuffs.

He was going to die. He was going to die, and he wasn’t sure if it was ecstasy or shame or a potent mix of the two, but he didn’t care, because he was going to die strapped down and at the mercy of this woman, and to him, that was to die happy.

_Ya tebya lyublyu,_ he thought.

“Fuck me,” he said.

Vissenta took one of his hands and sucked on his first two fingers as she fastened the first cuff. “That’s the idea,” she said, releasing his fingers from her lips with a soft, wet pop, and she guided his arm down and back to attach the ring of the cuff to the strap. The faint _tchk_ of the metal sliding into place shot a bolt of heat straight down from his head to his heart to his cock, and he arched up involuntarily, used his knees to pull Vissenta closer to him, to press his tongue to her breast that was still maddeningly concealed behind the lace of her bra.

She grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled him roughly away and brought her lips to his ear. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “There’s straps for your ankles too.”

_I serdtse byotsa v upoyene,_ he thought, his whole body gone hot, the fragments of poetry all he could summon in his mind, and he must have whispered it aloud, too, because Vissenta nipped at his earlobe and laughed softly. “I don’t know what that was,” she said. “But I want to hear you scream in every language you know.”

_Fuck._

She stripped him completely naked before she finished the job, and he was spread-eagle before her, his cock gone stiff and red and leaking without her even touching him further, and the look she gave him as she stood over him destroyed what last shreds of his coherent thought might have lingered. “Oh, I like this,” she murmured. She climbed over him once more, holding herself just above him, and he couldn’t even buck upwards to grind against her, and she was putting her index finger in his mouth and all he could do was suck, his half-lidded eyes on hers, silently pleading and begging as he moaned around the digit and stroked with his tongue.

Vissenta pulled back and sat between his legs, and he could only tilt his head up to watch as she raked her nails down hipbones, smiling with that wicked delight in her eyes when he keened in response. She was teasing him, bringing her hands closer and closer to his erection but pulling back at the last moment, until finally he had to beg. “Vissenta, _please_.”

“Mm, please what?” She dragged her still-wet finger down his inner thighs, just barely grazing against his asshole and laughing softly when he _yelped_. “What do you want, Ilya?”

His head fell back. “I want you to _fuck me, for the love of god._ ”

“Oh, you’re so beautiful when you beg, Ilya.”

The sound of his given name on her lips always thrilled him, but it thrilled him even more now, prodded at that deep feeling he’d had for weeks now, making the words bubble up once more, but those words were scattered to the four winds as soon as he felt her hot, wet mouth close around the tip of him. He devolved into nonsense, and the nonsense words fell out of him, first in Russian, then in French, then German and Spanish and one very complicated idiom he’d learned in Mandarin, once, and when he felt Vissenta’s hand gently cup his balls and that one finger of hers tease at his opening again, the words devolved into pure gibberish, no single language enough to encompass how this made him feel.

She pushed him to the very edge, well attuned to his rhythms now, and when she pulled back he _wailed_ , God help him, and his hips were stuttering as much as the restraints allowed, and now Vissenta was above him again, and she was unfastening her bra and all he could do was watch, all he could do was try desperately to reach the nipple that she let hover so teasingly just above him as she reached to slide her underwear down. She considered the damp, lace-trimmed bundle in her hand for a moment, looking pensively at his mouth, and shook her head. “Another time,” she said, her grin gone feral, and Julian whined when he realized what she meant. She leaned forward to take his mouth with hers instead, her lips open and hungry and her tongue stroking his, and when she pulled back from that searing kiss her smile was softer. “I want to hear those pretty words, even if I don’t know them.”

And then she was unrolling a condom, lining herself up to him, sat back, lowered herself inch by agonizing inch, until she had him seated fully inside her, and her eyes fluttered, and she reached down to stroke at her clit. “God, Ilya,” she rasped. “You’re so good for me.” She began to rock her hips, undulating and sinuous, and she was a _goddess_ , she was _holy_ , she was _divine_ , and he wanted her to use him for as long as he lived.

He could feel her fluttering around him, and he wanted to touch her, but the feeling of the cuffs around his wrists was no less delicious than the feeling of her skin, and so he let himself go, let it all go, surrendered the last small sliver of control that he held on his mind, and he let the words come out, let it flow the way she wanted to hear, and he was reciting those fragments of Pushkin again, because the ecstasy of the smitten Russian was the picture of his soul, after all, and it came to him easy as breathing.

When she came, he wasn’t far behind, and as she continued to clench around him and then fall forward to lavish his breastbone with kisses and licks and bites, the words finally spilled from his lips.

“Ya tebya lyublyu _.”_

Over and over, like a mantra, like a prayer. Ya tebya lyublyu. Ya tebya lyublyu.

_I love you._

_I love you._

_I love you._


	11. I'm Not Happy Or Sad, Just Up Or Down

Vissenta was starting to feel anxious.

She couldn’t pinpoint the source of her anxiety, couldn’t put a name to it, but she knew the creeping dread as soon as it started to prickle at the back of her mind. She hadn’t had time to go in for an appointment for a med refill, so she was carefully rationing out halves, and then quarters, of the alprazolam tablets rattling around in her pill case.

She wondered if her mama ever had the same problem.

Thankfully, she had work to distract her at least fifty hours a week, if not more. She could easily beg off from seeing Julian after a long night at the cafe, and some nights she took on even more work. She had recipes to develop, food cost spreadsheets to update, inventory to check and recheck, vendors to meet and farmers to pay. There was too much for her to neglect. _Because if I lose this, I really do lose everything._

Maybe that was where the anxiety was coming from. Maybe that was the pressing on her chest every morning when she woke up. It was the best she could figure, but usually, when she found a solution, she could work through the problem, and still, she was anxious.

She threw an assortment of cured meats and cheeses and pickles from the garde manger cooler onto a plate, poured cold coffee over ice, and headed downstairs to the office. She balanced the plate on her knees and ate absentmindedly as she scrolled through her phone, catching up on… what, exactly? What had her life been for the past month?

 _Work, sleep, Julian._ And sleep had been… rare, with the other two around.

She was smiling wistfully at all the gorgeous, sun-soaked photos Portia had posted to Instagram from the honeymoon when she heard a knock on the open door. “Door’s obviously open,” she said around a mouthful of fig and honey goat cheese that she’d been eating with her fingers.

“I brought you a fork,” Natiqa said. She perched on the desk, her own lunch in hand, and handed Vissenta the silverware. “Books are full up again tonight.”

Vissenta took the fork and smiled. “Books are full up every night.” She looked back down at her phone and tried to breathe around the weight that was coming back. “Pretty sure that the first night we aren’t, it’s gonna be the beginning of the end.”

“That’s not how it works.” Natiqa ate her lunch with far more decorum than Vissenta, fully chewing and swallowing each mouthful before speaking. “Not every bad sign means utter failure. Shit happens.”

_Oh, here we go again._

Vissenta finally looked up at Natiqa for more than a perfunctory moment. “I thought your master’s was in entrepreneurship, not psychology.”

“You are correct,” Natiqa intoned. “And I did an independent study in being your best friend, which means learning a lot of extra shit on the fly.”

Vissenta rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. “I bet your mom and dad are so proud.”

A shadow flitted across Natiqa’s eyes, and her brows furrowed for an instant, but she recovered with aplomb, as she always did. It was what made her the best restaurant manager in the business, and not just in Vesuvia, in Vissenta’s opinion. She was downright masterful at smoothing out the wrinkles that inevitably came up on a busy floor, at cleaning up messes and turning irate customers into incandescently happy ones. And because Vissenta had known her for years, she was starting to see the cracks beneath the surface, the strain that had carved the faintest vertical line between those impeccable eyebrows. Natiqa was tired. And seeing that made guilt pierce through the aching weight in Vissenta’s chest, because she clearly hadn’t been around enough lately.

She nudged Natiqa’s leg with her knee. “Hey. How have _you_ been, Tiqa?”

Natiqa shrugged. “Oh, you know, all the usual things for the second-youngest second-prettiest Satrinava kid.” She cocked her head to the side. “At least I’m the smartest.”

Vissenta snorted. “And definitely the most humble.”

They both laughed, and for a moment, the only sound was that of forks scraping plates before Natiqa spoke again. “Ama and Baba were asking about the business plan last night.”

Vissenta nearly dropped her glass of watery, cold coffee. “They what?”

Natiqa nodded. “I can’t write the whole thing this time. I know they could tell on the last one that it was straight out of a book.” She sat her mostly-empty plate aside, propped her elbow on her knee, and rested her chin on her fist. “If it’s gonna be your place, it needs your voice too.” She winked. “This isn’t a school group project, babe. I’m not pulling all the weight.”

Vissenta frowned as she used her fork to cut a slice of manchego into smaller and smaller fragments. “Sorry. I’ve just had… stuff going on.”

“Stuff that’s six foot four with an aversion to using the top two buttons of his shirts?”

Vissenta stuck out her tongue. “I thought you were happy for me.”

Natiqa made a face. “I am happy for you. We’re all _thrilled_ that you aren’t working yourself to death here.” She sat up straight once more. “You just kind of flipped a switch. Went all in on something else.”

Vissenta pointed her fork accusingly. “ _You’re_ the one always telling me to whole-ass things and not half-ass ‘em.”

At this, Natiqa held up her hands. “Whoa whoa whoa. I’m pretty sure my words on Julian Devorak were that he has _no_ ass.”

More laughter, then more silence. Finally, Vissenta sighed. “I know. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. I’m starting to…” Suddenly, the weight pressed down, and she rubbed at her chest. “I’m starting to think I’m not built for relationships.”

Natiqa rolled her shoulders in an elegant shrug. “I don’t think Julian’s built for them either, if that makes you feel better.”

“Oh, totally,” Vissenta said dryly. “Because nothing says success like two people who are bad at the thing they’re trying to do.”

Natiqa slid off of the desk and collected her plate and fork and glass. “I think we did pretty well at this, for not knowing what the hell we were doing.”

Vissenta shook her head. “Not the same thing.”

“I mean, no.” Natiqa gave her one last look as she backed out of the office doorway. “But like I said. It’s not about a one hundred percent success rate. Shit happens.” She tilted her head ever so slightly to the side. “Just remember to come up for air once in a while.”

Alone in the office once more, Vissenta pulled her phone back out. Normally, she could expect a text from Julian about this time, but those had been coming with less regularity than at the start of all this. She supposed that was a good thing, but she still couldn’t push away the familiar weight. The prickle was growing, from thorn to talon, something ugly sinking into her heart and lungs, and she knew _exactly_ what was happening, and still she couldn’t see how to make it stop.

She took out the pill box and snapped it open, took half a Xanax from the dwindling supply, and stood. There was work to do. There was always work to do.

* * *

She realized on Sunday afternoon, with no small measure of guilt, that she hadn’t spent much time with Asra lately, either. So many people and places and _things_ had fallen by the wayside, all of her energy poured into Julian instead, and it was all pressing down on her.

Closing in.

Something had to give.

**Coffee?**

Asra immediately replied. **See you in ten.**

They always met at the same coffee shop that had been their second home as undergrads, when Asra was fueling all of his design projects exclusively with London Fogs and pain au chocolat and Vissenta was staring at GMAT prep books through red-rimmed, espresso-addled eyes. For a place where they’d ostensibly suffered together so much, it was oddly comforting. _Shared trauma, I suppose_ , Vissenta mused as she ordered an iced Americano.

She dropped into a worn armchair in the corner, sagging dangerously close to the floor as the springs in the seat groaned in protest at the sudden weight. Asra was already seated on the scarred bench along the wall, and together they took a moment to just pause, and drink, and nibble at the pastries they’d bought. Finally, Vissenta sat her coffee down on the small table between them. “How’s the school year going?”

Asra smiled and sipped his tea. “Oh, same as always. Changing tiny lives through the power of finger-paint and glitter.”

“Better you than me.” Vissenta crossed one ankle over the opposite knee and shifted around in the creaking armchair, trying to find a way to comfortably sit that didn’t make her feel as if she was going to be devoured by threadbare upholstery and miserably flat poly fill stuffing. No matter what she did, something was always poking into her back, or her thigh, or her hip, or even her calf, and after a few uncomfortable minutes she finally gave up. Asra was still looking at her, expectantly, as if he knew she had something else to say.

He always seemed to know. It was _unsettling_ , sometimes.

She took another sip of her coffee. “So.”

“How’s Ilya?” Asra polished off a chocolate croissant and eyed the untouched one in front of Vissenta.

Vissenta pushed the chipped plate over. “Oh, he’s… you know. Ilya.”

“Uh-huh.” Asra gave her one of those _looks_ , and Vissenta knew she wasn’t going to be able to keep everything to herself for much longer.

“What does…” She tried to form the words correctly, imitate what she’d heard Julian say in the throes of passion the other night, though she had a feeling that he hadn’t been clearly enunciating. “Yeh-tibeh-lub…” She stumbled on it. “I don’t know if I’m saying this right.”

“Ya tebya lyublyu,” Asra supplied, the phrase rolling off his tongue with ease. “Oh, he’s pulled that one out, huh?”

Vissenta blinked. “Is it… is it bad?”

Asra shook his head, a smile on his lips that didn’t quite reach his eyes, which looked to be full of… pity? Concern? Agitation? All three? “It means ‘I love you.’”

_It means—_

_Shit—_

_Fuck—_

Vissenta stared out the window at the front of the coffee shop’s large main room, watching the cars drive down the street just past the sidewalk, watching the flash of the sunlight reflected on windshields and the blurry shadows of people walking by and sitting outside. The pressing weight grew, expanded, pressed up and out and into her fingers and ears and all she could hear was the faint ringing and buzzing and her thoughts swirled, jumbled, and then flitted away, and then swarmed back, and she was breathing too quickly, she could feel the short bursts of air in and out of her nostrils and her vision started to swim and she was—

“Vissenta.” Asra’s hand waved in front of her face, and then both his hands were on her shoulders, and he was kneeling in front of her at eye level, and she could feel the condensation of the glass in her hands along her leg and then the glass was slipping and a few drops of something dripped over her fingers so she must be losing grip on it and she couldn’t do that, and she had to focus on _those_ things, find something _concrete_ , she had to _breathe goddammit—_

“Vissenta.” The coffee was out of her hands now - she must have looked ready to drop it, and Asra had taken it to set it aside - and he had both her hands in his, and finally, she could look at him. He was counting. “In two three four five, out two three four five…”

“I’m fine,” she lied. “It’s fine, Asra. Why wouldn’t I be fine, why would everything not be fine—“ Her voice pitched higher and higher until she was barely squeaking out the last “fine” and she squeezed Asra’s hands. Then, something else registered. “How do you know what it means?”

Asra’s look went from calm to pained, but still he held on as Vissenta took deeper breaths. “It’s something he said to me.”

Of course. That made sense. Right? It made sense. So why did Asra look so distressed at this admission? “And?”

Asra stood and went back to his seat when he was certain Vissenta was breathing properly again. “Ilya falls hard and fast,” he said, wrapping his hands around his mug once more and staring into the rapidly-cooling tea. “And he’s fully aware of this. It was…” His mouth twisted. “A point of contention.”

“So you’re saying he might not actually mean it.” Vissenta dug her nails into her palms, the sting of the action keeping her tethered to the ground for the time being. “So I don’t have to say it back.”

At this, Asra’s eyes met hers. “But you do want to say it back.”

Vissenta shook her head fervently. “No I don’t. I don’t. It… it’ll ruin everything.” Abruptly, she stood. “I have to go. I have… I have to go.” She started walking, ignoring Asra’s voice calling to her from across the room, ignoring the stares of the other patrons as she shouldered her way out of the front door, nearly bowling over a couple of teenage kids in the process. Everything was too bright again, everything was ringing, everything was wrong, and she couldn’t go _home_ because Julian might be there because she _gave him her keys_ because she was an _idiot_ and she _let him get too close they were never supposed to get this close they were never supposed to ruin everything like this they were never—_

* * *

There was only one place Vissenta knew to go when there was absolutely nowhere else to turn. It was the last place she wanted to go, and the first place she wanted to go, and suddenly she was twenty-four again and a washed-up failure who’d failed the one person who loved her most and none of the love in the world could keep her alive and she was jogging now, and then running, her feet pounding the sidewalk in a familiar path as tears blurred her face.

Celeste opened the door, just like she had that night, the first time everything else fell apart. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said, and pulled Vissenta into an embrace and led her inside.

Vissenta felt her phone buzzing in her pocket and she ignored it. She couldn’t face it. She couldn’t tell Julian why everything had gone so wrong, why she wasn’t home, because who wants to hear that the words “I love you” caused emotional collapse?

She was going to destroy him, she was going to hurt him, and she was going to hurt herself, and maybe she already _had_ hurt herself, maybe that’s all this was, just another exercise in hurting herself that didn’t leave messy scars behind, and—

Celeste knew exactly what to do, because this wasn’t the first time she’d carried Vissenta through a breakdown, wasn’t the first time she’d embraced her sister-in-law with all the loving care of the mother she’d lost, and Vissenta felt so _guilty_ again, because she was falling apart and vulnerable, but then the shaking started and she gave up and let Celeste gently pull her clothes off and lower her into the garden tub that was already miraculously half-filled with fragrant, steaming water.

She cried then.

She cried and she could hear the bathroom door opening and Marcelie’s low voice and Celeste’s smooth, measured reply, none of the words making sense in her head, because all she could think of were the words that Julian had told her. They played in her mind, over and over, and the terror of their weight and meaning caused fresh rounds of tears to burst over the dam once again.

Finally, the tears slowed. She stared down into the water, now gone pink and glittering with whatever bath bomb Celeste had dropped in somewhere along the way, and she sniffled. “This is embarrassing,” she muttered.

“You needed this,” Celeste answered. She was sitting in a chair beside the tub, holding a glass of orange juice and a bottle of sparkling water. She handed the first over to Vissenta with a gentle smile. “Don’t be embarrassed of needing our help.”

Vissenta took the juice and chugged it, then took the sparkling water. She could hear her phone buzzing from the other side of the room, but when Celeste reached for it, she shook her head. “I can’t talk to him right now.”

Slowly, Celeste nodded, realization dawning on her calm features. “A fight, then?”

Vissenta shook her head again. “He told me…” Her breath and voice caught and the tears were back and she didn’t know _why_ this scared her so much, didn’t know _why_ she was _crying_ about something that should make her _happy_ , and she finally got the words out. “He told me he loves me?”

Rather than greet this news with shock, or confusion, or admonition, Celeste simply nodded. “No one in your family does well with that news.”

Vissenta blinked up at her through the tears sticking her lashes together. “Come again?”

Celeste flashed her a wry smile. “You should have seen the way your sister reacted when I told her I loved her.”

Vissenta sank down deeper into the warm water, carefully holding the bottle of sparkling water above the surface. “You know, the funny thing is, I was worried about him leaving me before I could leave him.”

They both heard her phone buzzing again. Celeste stood and crossed the bathroom, pulled it from beneath the neatly-folded stack of clothes, and frowned down at the screen. “Sweetheart, he’s obviously worried sick.”

“Stop reading my private mail,” Vissenta sulked.

“Of all the…” Celeste put the phone down on the chair where she’d been sitting, easily within Vissenta’s reach, and threw up her hands. “You and Marcelie are both impossible, you know.” She glided from the bathroom, still shaking her head. “Dinner will be ready soon.”

For a few minutes, Vissenta resisted the urge to look at the phone, but then the screen was lighting up again, it was buzzing its way along the width of the chair seat, it was about to fall to the floor, and in one motion she grabbed a dry washcloth and swept it up into her hands. Unfortunately, she was a little too overzealous with her movements, and the phone plopped unceremoniously into the bathtub. “God _fucking_ dammit.”

Still, it wasn’t a problem for today Vissenta. It couldn’t be a problem for today Vissenta, because today Vissenta was still shaken over hearing about those _words_ and was still frightened by how they made her feel. How terrified. How panicked. How… exhilarated, somewhere, hidden deep down in there, though she thought that might just be the fight or flight response kicking in and some seriously misplaced endorphins crossing the wires in her brain.

When she toweled off and dressed again and headed downstairs, she dropped her dead phone into an empty bowl and rummaged around in the kitchen for the rice. All she could find was expensive, imported arborio, and while it seemed a shame to waste it, she rather felt like Marcelie might deserve it a little bit, just for being so bougie. She upended the whole package over the phone before stalking into the dining room.

Celeste was spoon-feeding Rémy something unappetizingly muddied brown, apparently mixed from an orange mush and a green mush, as Marcelie was pouring what had to be her third glass of wine of the evening. They both looked up at the sound of Vissenta’s footsteps, and Vissenta went from stomping to shuffling, suddenly ashamed, suddenly a kid _again_ , because the look on Marcelie’s face was almost identical to that of their father’s, and it made her stomach turn to ice and stone and barbed wire all at once.

“So,” Marcelie began. “Your boyfriend told you that he loves you.”

“In _Russian,_ ” Vissenta blurted out.

Marcelie raised an eyebrow. “Does it bother you that he said it, or that it was in Russian?”

Vissenta sighed and sat down and lay her head in her crossed arms on the table. “Both,” came her muffled reply.

“She’s upset, Marcie,” Celeste said over Rémy’s sudden protesting cry at nothing in particular. “I’m going to take the baby upstairs, and you two are going to talk.”

 _Great_.

When Rémy’s sniffles and Celeste’s soothing coos faded, Vissenta finally looked up at Marcelie, her face gone blotchy and red and tear-stained again. “There’s something _wrong_ with me, Marcie.”

Marcelie looked as if she wanted to reach across the table and pat her little sister’s arm, but she didn’t manage to move her hand more than an inch before she pulled back. “There’s something wrong with everyone, Vis.” At Vissenta’s wobbling lower lip, she sighed and tried again. “When was the last time you went to therapy?”

Furrowing her brow, Vissenta thought back. It had been before the restaurant opened. Well, before she and Tiqa had presented the Satrinava parents with their initial proposal. Well… maybe before even then. She shrugged in answer.

“You should go back,” Marcelie said, a little more gently than usual. “I’m not the least bit qualified.”

Vissenta gave the wine bottle a pointed stare. “Leave any for me?”

Marcelie pulled the wine closer to herself. “Nuh-uh. You’re not numbing out this time. Celeste said we’re talking, so we’re talking, and you’re gonna do it sober.”

“That’s no fair,” Vissenta said, her old whine creeping back into her voice. She slumped back in the chair. “I don’t see what else there is to talk about.”

“You’re allowed to love people,” came Marcelie’s outburst, sudden and forceful enough that Vissenta sat up straight in her chair. “You’re _supposed_ to love people, Vissenta.”

“I love plenty of people!”

Marcelie shook her head. “You know what I mean.” She sighed and drained her wineglass. “God, I’m really bad at this.”

“Both of us are, according to Celeste,” Vissenta grumbled. She finally picked up the glass of water that had been set at her place at the table and took a gulp. “It’s too easy to lose people when you start loving them,” she said, finally.

Marcelie poured the rest of the bottle of cabernet into her glass. “Vissenta, I have heard you say a lot of stupid shit, including, but not limited to, the time you tried to convince me that this house is haunted.”

“I heard things!”

“You were _drunk_ and holding a _seance_ in my _living room_ while Asra Alnazar was _unsupervised_!”

There was a long pause, and then the two women dissolved into raucous laughter. Snorting, Vissenta wiped her eyes and took another drink of water. “Okay, fine. I still think I have a good point.”

“You know what? Fine.” Marcelie waved her glass around. “If you aren’t into the romantic thing, I know that’s what you kids are into these days, right?”

“Hey.” Vissenta jabbed a finger in Marcelie’s direction. “Being aromantic is completely valid.” She faltered. “But I don’t think I’m like that, no.”

Marcelie leaned forward. “So what _are_ you like, Vissenta Louise?”

_Vissenta Louise._

The only other person who’d ever called her that was Mama, in irritation and affection in equal measure.

 _Fuck._ The tears were prickling again.

Vissenta rested her elbows on the table. “I wish Mama was here,” she said softly.

This time, Marcelie’s expression did fully soften, and her resemblance to their father melted away, and there was a kindness in those eyes that echoed the woman who’d borne them. “Loving her wasn’t going to fix everything,” she said quietly.

“So how is loving Julian going to fix anything?” Vissenta’s words were hot, hot as the tears stinging her eyes, and she scrubbed furiously at her face with the heels of her hands. “It’s not gonna fix me, it’s not gonna fix him, and sooner or later one of us is going to hurt the other one.”

Marcelie did reach for her hand, now. “You’re hurting him right now, if he doesn’t know what’s going on,” she said. “You’re going to hurt each other in small ways, because love is like that sometimes.” She twisted her wedding band thoughtfully. “Love is letting someone have that power and trusting them to grow with you. Soothe what they might hurt accidentally. Because it’s never intentional.”

Vissenta sniffled. “I’m an idiot.”

This earned a rueful smile from Marcelie. “Sometimes. But you’ve got the good sense to acknowledge it.” She stood up. “Come on. I think you’ve earned that glass of wine.”

Suddenly, they heard banging on the front door, followed by the bellow that could only come from Portia Devorak’s petite but mighty lungs. “Vissenta Senadz, you get your ass out here right now!”


	12. No One's Picking Up The Phone, Guess It's Me And Me

There was a stack of lab reports in front of Julian, all awaiting his correction and guidance (which was rich, considering he had absolutely no authority with which to correct _anyone_ save what meager authority Nazali had granted him), but all he could think about was his phone. Specifically, all he could think about was how conspicuously silent it had been all day.

The blessing of technology that had him in constant contact with Vissenta was, it turned out, a curse, for just as he got used to always hearing at least _something_ from her in the course of a busy day, he suddenly heard nothing. _She’s busy,_ he told himself. _You’re supposed to be busy too._

He was on the opposite side of Nazali’s desk in their office, as after a week of attempting to do his job in Valdemar’s office, he came to Nazali begging for a change of scenery. Dr. Satrinava took pity on him. “But only because I like you,” they admonished gently. “And because Valdy is a creepshow.”

Across from him, Nazali leaned back and sighed. “How much longer, Julian?”

Julian looked up. “You can just let me lock up, you know.”

Nazali raised one eyebrow and shook their head. “Absolutely not.” They stood and stretched, raising their arms and tugging on one crooked elbow, then the other. “This wouldn’t be a problem if you’d done all the work during the week.”

He could feel himself blushing. “I, ah… you’re right.”

Nazali cupped a hand around their ear. “I’m sorry? What was that? A little louder, please.”

Julian sighed and smiled just a little bit, in spite of himself. “I said you’re right, Dr. Satrinava, o greatest doctor in all of Vesuvia and Prakra, the genius who taught me everything I know—“

“Okay, okay, you’re laying it on thick,” Nazali retorted. “And you must not have retained much, because I know I taught you better than that.”

“Oh, that stings. It wounds me! I am damaged _beyond repair_!” Julian pressed one hand to his forehead and one to his breastbone, the faux drama distracting him from the fact that he hadn’t heard from Vissenta since Friday night. He wasn’t going to bother her. He wasn’t. He’d see her tonight. Wouldn’t he?

Nazali swooped by to gather up the papers and folders in front of Julian. “And you know the best way to treat a wound, right?” They winked. “Judicious application of alcohol.”

Walking to the Raven in this early autumn sunset just made Julian think of Vissenta even more, if such a thing was possible. _You’ll see her tonight you’ll see her tonight you’ll see her tonight—_

“I have something for you,” Nazali said when the two of them slid into the booth in the corner of the bar farthest from the door. They reached into their messenger bag and produced an innocuous white envelope, letter sized, clearly sealed and with something inside, but nothing written on the outside. They slid it across the table.

Julian picked it up and turned it over to open it, but stopped when Nazali let out a quick “no!” at the action. Perplexed, he sat the envelope back down in front of him and gave Nazali a questioning stare. “So?”

“Letter of recommendation.” Nazali smiled up at the waitress, a frazzled-looking young woman with her apron pockets full of check presenters and pens and straws, and held up two fingers. “Two of the Bells Two-Hearteds, please. And keep ‘em coming.”

Julian must have still looked flummoxed when Nazali met his stare once more, because they shrugged and leaned back, throwing an arm along the back of the booth seat as they gestured at the envelope with their other hand. “Application deadline is December 1. I just think you could do it, Julian.”

The corners of Julian’s mouth began to turn down. Rather than reply, he reached for his phone, and as he stared at a screen empty of notifications, his frown deepened.

“Put that damn thing away,” Nazali said sharply.

Chastised, Julian hurriedly slipped the device back into his pocket and moved to slide the envelope back across the table to Nazali. “I appreciate it, Nazali, I really do, but—“

“No buts.” Nazali pushed the envelope back. “You’re smart as hell, Julian. So maybe med school didn’t work for you. So what?”

Julian’s shoulders slumped a little bit, the black cloud of self-loathing settling back in. “So what? So I failed.” The beers Nazali had ordered appeared before them, and he immediately drank far more of his in one go than he probably should have. He sat the glass back down and ran his other hand through his hair, finally meeting Nazali’s eyes, trying to make them _see_ how hopeless this all was, trying to make them _see_ what a sad-sack he really was. “How is climbing up in the academia pyramid scheme going to help anyone?”

“It helps plenty of people,” Nazali snapped. “The department’s partnership with the Prakran Institute means we’re at the forefront of research. You’re literally, currently, _at this very moment,_ working in a lab that lays the groundwork for the stuff that saves lives.” They took a much smaller, much more reasonable sip from their own beer. “And maybe you can stop wallowing and do something about this self-worth issue you’ve had going on since we met.”

The bar was filling up fast now, with seats harder and harder to come by, and the hum of voices grew louder. It was effectively enough to help put a damper on Julian’s more worried thoughts for a few moments longer. He could feel the familiar buzz of the alcohol soften the edges of his mind, loosen his tongue, and he gave Nazali one of his most bitterly sardonic smiles. “Come on, Nazali. When have I ever had anything but the highest opinion of myself? The picture of a healthy, outsized ego, I am.”

Nazali rolled their eyes, affection twitching the corner of their mouth upwards. “The picture of a theater kid is what you are. If you find the time you could even be in the plays that University Theatre puts on.” They gave him a meaningful look. “You know. The ones that _students_ and _faculty_ participate in.”

“Well, if you’d begun your sales pitch _that_ way,” Julian replied. He shifted a little, once again trying very hard to ignore the lack of life from his phone. “I’ll consider it,” he finally relented.

“I’ll drink to that.” Nazali raised their pint glass. Over the rim, their eyes widened slightly, and when they sat the glass back down, they waved to someone over Julian’s shoulder. “Asra! Asra, we’ve got a free seat over here!”

* * *

Julian would have liked nothing more than to make a quick exit as soon as he spotted Asra Alnazar. Problem was, he did not actually spot Asra until Asra had slid into the booth right next to him, thereby blocking his quickest and least humiliating mode of exit. He was considering the possibility of sliding underneath the table and out (unlikely, and embarrassing, and even he could admit that his arms and legs were a touch too long to make that anything but clumsy and potentially destructive to the Raven’s property) when Asra turned those disarming violet eyes on him. “How are things, Ilya?”

Nazali watched this brief interaction - Asra’s collected demeanor, one clearly used to dealing with petulant and panicked children, which Julian was apparently doing his best to emulate - and slapped their palms on the table. “I’ve got to go see a man about a, ah, raven.” They slid out of the booth, pint glass in hand.

As Julian continued to ponder using _this_ opening as an escape, Asra propped one foot up on the bench seat that Nazali had just vacated. “We need to talk sooner or later, Ilya.”

“I… right.” Julian rubbed a hand over his face and sighed. “Asra, I’m—“

“We _specifically_ need to talk about Vissenta.”

Julian blanched. “We… we do?”

Asra quirked a brow and propped his chin in his palm. “She had some language learning questions for me, in fact.”

His heart sank. “She… she did, did she?”

Asra sighed. “Ilya…” When the waitress came by to check on the table, he turned to smile. “One of Sander’s sodas for me, and another round for him, thank you _so_ much.” He turned back when she left, the smile evaporating as quickly as he’d pinned it on. “Ilya, what were you thinking?”

Julian did what he knew how to do best - finish his drink and fumble around for an answer. “What do you _mean_ what was I thinking? I was thinking I love her, Asra.”

Asra leaned back and crossed his arms, one leg still blocking any possible other exit from the booth. “The same way you said you loved me? I mean, God knows, I was glad _that_ turned out to be anything but the case, because I _told_ you exactly what we were doing—“

“I loved her then, too,” Julian blurted out.

Asra abruptly dropped his leg from where it was propped on the bench, along with his lower jaw, and he sat there gaping soundlessly at Julian for a good thirty seconds before snapping his mouth shut once more and inclining his head toward Julian. “Are you fucking…” He turned abruptly when the server dropped their drinks, flashing another of those smiles that came to him so easily, and then rounded on Julian once more. “I… believe that, actually.”

Julian seized the pint glass of beer and drank deep once more, his head starting to swim from more than just the alcohol, though that played no small part in how suddenly warm his face and neck had grown and how much his heartbeat was starting to ring in his ears. He’d have to drink much more, and much faster, to banish all those feelings for the rest of the night. “It’s why I felt so…” He blinked, bit his lip, looked down and then at the table and then just above Asra’s head, because meeting those eyes was always a bit too much but it was _absolutely_ too much right now. “I’ve been sorry for five years, Asra. I’ve been regretful and guilty and… and…” He took another drink. “And I thought I wouldn’t have to face it again, and yet here I am.”

Asra sipped on something so bright red it must have been made of grenadine, soda, and little else. “Well, seems better for you that you had to, hm?”

Julian was once again painfully aware that he hadn’t had a text or a call from the one person who seemed to do so with regularity, all day long. “Might not have been.”

Asra sighed. “Ilya, I’ve long since forgiven you. I’m a lot more worried about Vis.”

Julian stared into his half-empty pint glass, suddenly mesmerized by the slow streams of tiny bubbles rising up to the surface from the bottom. “If I’d been here, then, when all of…”

“You would have martyred yourself even further, if that’s even possible.” Asra sat his glass down and tentatively reached for Julian, obviously uncertain of what was actually permissible, and finally landed on an awkward pat on Julian’s shoulder that would have been downright comical in any other circumstance. “She has been through enough. And so have you.” The corners of his mouth turned down in a moue of concern, a genuine look, one that Julian had never seen before, even when he’d been beneath Asra gasping and begging for things that were beyond safe or sane. “I want both of you to do this right. For each others’ sake.”

Julian felt as if his shoulder was burning where Asra’s fingers rested on it so lightly, but he couldn’t shake them away just yet. “Well, that’s certainly a tall order, me doing something right by someone else.”

Asra shook his head. “Oh, no, you do that impeccably well. To a fault, and wholly at your own expense. And so does she.” He finished his grenadine and soda and stood. “Don’t get too drunk.” He nodded at Julian’s hand that had wandered back to hover over his pocket. “And call her. She needs to hear from you.”

* * *

The first call went unanswered.

He assumed this had a perfectly rational explanation. Vissenta was in the shower, or had her phone set aside while she cooked, and she was simply waiting to see if he’d come by tonight like he had for the past four Sunday nights.

_It’s only been a month._

But it didn’t feel like just a month to him, did it? This was more than just a month. This was a culmination of something greater, an idea he’d held onto for so long.

_She deserves better than just being your idea._

He ordered another beer.

He called a second time, to no answer.

He wasn’t going to leave a voicemail. There was no reason to leave a voicemail. After this drink, he would pay up, he would leave, he would go to her apartment, he would apologize, he would swear off those three godforsaken words forever, he would walk away when she told him to.

He could do this.

Julian called a third time. Alcohol would do that: strip him of his impulse control, turn him into a self-loathing monstrous mess, open the door for the nasty and snarling little voice that reminded him, over and over:

_Selfish._

_Selfish._

_Selfish._

He wouldn’t call again. He wouldn’t. He would finish this last drink - oh, wait, he’d ordered another, he would finish _this_ drink - and then he would leave, do all of this in person, and that would be the end of it.

He called a fourth time. “Vis,” he said, feeling foolish all of a sudden, huddled in this corner booth alone, Nazali long gone, practically shouting into his phone to make sure he was heard over the din of people and music and the buzzing, hissing voice in his own head. “Vis, I’m sorry, I’ll be there soon, I know we need to talk, I’ll…”

He trailed off, ended the call. Stared at the strange device in his hands, one that had seen him bare his soul in the strangest little ways for four weeks now. The daily rituals, daily intimacies, daily _lies_ that had him _convinced_ he could have this for good, and then he had to go and ruin it all.

But he did love her. That was the horrible, tragic part of it all.

And he was starting to suspect that she knew this, and wanted nothing to do with any of it, and he couldn’t blame her.

She was definitely ignoring his calls.

Well, there was one person Julian was certain wouldn’t ignore him if he called.

_Or maybe she will._

He ordered another beer. He’d lost count of them by now. All he knew was the warmth they brought him, the way his movements became so easy and liquid and how, when Pasha answered her phone with a cautious and lilting “Ilya,” he was able to slip so easily into nonsensical honesty.

“Pasha! Your prodigal brother summons you! Come have a drink with me!”

He heard her sigh, and mumble something in the distance, and then she was back on the line. “Ilya, are you at the Raven?”

“Where else would I be, Pasha?” Julian was having a hard time holding the phone up to his face now, but he managed well enough, and he traced a finger through the rings of condensation on the laminate tabletop where the beers of his miseries just recently past once stood.

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

Perfect. Enough time for another drink.

Even with Portia’s promise to arrive, Julian was still more than a little surprised when she plunked down into the seat opposite him. “God, Ilya, how much have you had to drink?”

Julian grinned up at her and waved a hand. “Oh, I’ve always been bad at math.”

“You took college-level calculus as a high school sophomore,” Portia shot back.

“Well,” Julian began. “Then the answer is… the limit… does not exist.”

Portia reached over to snatch what remained of his pint from him and drained it. “Okay, Ilya. You’re done. And we’re going to Mazelinka’s _now_.”

Julian groaned and put his face into his hands. “That’s it. I’ve failed again.” His self-indulgent, self-loathing, _utterly selfish_ groaning was brought to an abrupt halt as Portia looped her arm around him and hoisted him up by the armpits. “Hey!”

Portia handed the waitress a crisp bill. “Keep the change.”

Julian smirked. “Ohohoho, her highness Mrs. Satrinava over here.”

“Shut up.” Portia half-guided, half-dragged him through the crowd and out the Raven’s front door. She continued to pull and push him along to the parking lot around the corner, where a much nicer car than Julian had ever been in was parked and waiting and, apparently, unlocked, as it belonged to his sister.

She’d done _very_ well for herself, it would seem.

Portia slammed the passenger door behind him, and when she slammed her own door shut and pressed the ignition button, her face was suddenly illuminated in the reddish-orange glow of the dashboard lights. “If you vomit on my upholstery, I will make you clean it yourself. Tomorrow. While you’re hungover.” With that, she peeled out of the parking lot.

* * *

There was absolutely nothing wrong.

He was _fine_.

He was _more than fine_.

He felt absolutely _wonderful._

He’d been trying to tell Portia this on the drive across downtown, further south and east until they reached Mazelinka’s block, but she wasn’t _listening_ , and he didn’t know how to make her _listen to him_.

Portia pulled up the parking brake. “What’s this about, Ilya?”

Julian lolled his head against the headrest, swinging around to meet Portia’s eyes as best as he could manage. This seat was so comfortable. He was tired, all of a sudden. He could maybe fall asleep sitting right here. “You grew up so much, Pasha.”

This gave Portia some measure of pause. Her expression shifted from pissed off to piercing, and then her lower lip quivered. “This is the worst way to do this, Ilya.”

Julian closed his eyes. “I know. I am, as it turns out, a master of ill-timed declarations.”

Portia pressed into her eyelashes with her fingertips, wiped away the tears that had sprung up, and shook her head. “We’re family, Ilya. We’re the only family we’ve got.”

“And I’ve been the worst—“

“Stop it!” Portia reached over and took Julian by the chin, squeezed his lower face in her hand, and jerked him down to eye level. “You don’t have to _earn this_. Now tell me what’s wrong.”

Julian pulled back from Portia’s grip and rubbed at his jaw where she’d dug her fingers in. “I’m in love with Vissenta.”

They sat there for a moment, both silent, and Julian suddenly wished he could pull those words back in, just collect them and stuff them back inside a small box, and he could lock that box away, and he could pretend it never existed in the first place, and he could go back to pretending everything was okay and that he could live without _saying_ these things, because every time he actually said them, every time he was honest, everything went wrong.

Once, Julian had learned about the definition of “nonplussed.” He’d used the word incorrectly, it turned out, in a paper. The teacher told him to look it up, and when he had, he saw that he’d been as far from the truth of the word as possible.

_Nonplussed. Adjective. So confused, one is unsure of how to react._

Portia was, at this moment the very picture of “nonplussed.” She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “You… are in love with Vissenta.”

Julian nodded, miserably.

Portia sat back in her seat. “And this is a problem worth drinking about… how?”

He couldn’t make her _understand_ , he couldn’t make her see that _all of this was wrong_ and—

“I told her.”

Portia threw up her hands. “I don’t understand this. I mean, I knew I wasn’t gonna understand it, but…” She flopped her head back. “I _really_ don’t understand it.”

“That makes two of us,” Julian mumbled, now gone from dramatically drunk to desperately doubt-filled drunk. He sighed and rubbed his palms along his knees. “She’s just...Pasha, she’s always been incredible. Amazing. And she wanted a friend, and I went and…” He couldn’t find the rest of the words.

Portia jabbed a finger in his face. “Oh no no no. I know you, and I know Vissenta.” She fished her phone from her bra. “I’m calling her right now.”

Julian watched Portia’s face flit from irritation, to worry, to something strange, something steely, some sort of resolve he didn’t remember seeing in her every in his life, though he had the feeling it had always been there. It had always been there, and he hadn’t been, and—

The spiral of self-loathing didn’t have a chance to go very far before Portia leaned over him to open the passenger door. “You’re going inside, and Mazelinka is making you some coffee, and you’re going to work on sobering up.”

Julian sat, frozen in place. “I’m… what?” He stared at the open door. “What?”

Portia pulled her mass of curls, which had been down, clearly all part of a relaxing Sunday night with Nadia that Julian had so rudely interrupted, and bunched them into a ponytail. She brushed an errant strand back from her face and pointed out the door. “The two of you are perfect for each other,” she began.

“Pasha, I’ve been trying to tell you--“

“Because you’re both morons!” Portia cut him off at the pass with all the subtlety and precision of a sledgehammer. “You’re both absolute idiots, and if no one else is gonna slap some sense into you, then as your loving sister, I’m stepping up.”


	13. Your Questions Like Directions To The Truth

Vissenta thought she’d seen Portia get angry before the wedding, but that singular outburst had been nothing compared to whatever force possessed the younger Devorak tonight. Portia was _seething_. Vissenta knew for a fact that she’d never seen Portia seethe, not even once. And what made this all the more terrifying was the knowledge that _she_ was the one on the receiving end of this frightening new display of emotion.

She shrank down in the passenger seat of the Jag, cradling her still-dead phone in her hands. They were idling at a red light, and Portia was staring bloody murder at the intersection, her seething rage apparently extending beyond the confines of the car’s interior and its very sheepish, very nervous passenger. Vissenta finally held up the phone. “It fell in the tub,” she whispered.

“Do you love my brother?”

Vissenta dropped the phone back in her lap. She watched Portia gun the engine and switch into gear the instant the light turned green and threw her hands out toward the dashboard for dear life. “What?”

“I said,” Portia began, taking a turn much faster than she really ought to have, “do you love my brother?”

Portia was not the Devorak that Vissenta wanted to confess this to, but it appeared she didn’t have much choice, if she wanted to make it out of this luxury sedan in one piece. “Yes!” She was white-knuckled now as Portia changed lanes. “Jesus Christ, did Mazelinka teach you how to drive?”

Portia hit the brake as she pulled up in front of Mazelinka’s house, bringing them to a sudden, screeching halt. “She did, because my brother wasn’t here to do it,” she groused. She whirled around and leaned toward Vissenta, brows knit together and her face the picture of frustration, of anger, and of determination, all at once. “But I’ve got plenty of time to have those conversations with him. _You_ need to have _this one_ with him _right now._ ” She opened her door without bothering to turn off the ignition. “Don’t move.”

Obediently, Vissenta stayed put, staring into the middle distance as her thoughts did that swirling, flying thing again, in and out, so she could only catch at wisps of them, the fallen feathers of all the sentences and paragraphs she could say to Julian right now, leaving her with a word here, a fragment there, and none of it seemed to be _enough_.

She just hoped she hadn’t hurt him too much.

When Portia opened the back passenger door and unceremoniously shoved Julian inside, Vissenta could smell coffee and alcohol wafting in on the air with him.

_Shit._ Seemed like maybe she _had_ done some damage.

_Soothe what they might hurt accidentally,_ came Marcelie’s words, the first full sentence Vissenta could form in her head in the minutes since Portia came banging on the door and demanding she pull her head out of her ass. She hadn’t meant to hurt Julian. He hadn’t meant to hurt her. He hadn’t hurt her, not really. She hadn’t given him that chance, yet.

But maybe she was ready to risk it.

The ride to the house that held Vissenta’s apartment was painfully silent, tension hanging as thick as the mingled scents of fresh coffee and stale beer and the cloying, floral perfume that still clung to Vissenta’s skin from her bath. As soon as Portia pulled the car to a stop beside the curb and put it in park, she unbuckled her seatbelt in order to twist around fully in her seat so she could face both her red-faced, embarrassed passengers. “Now, I’ve said this to both of you separately, and I will say it to you together.” She tented her fingers, clearly trying her level best to stay calm, but Vissenta swore she could see her right eyelid beginning to twitch. “You are both the biggest overthinking idiots I have known in my life, and that either makes you absolutely wrong for each other, or absolutely right.” Her expression softened just a touch. “Now, being a happily married woman, I like to believe in the best possible outcomes.”

Vissenta opened her mouth. “Portia—“

Portia held up her hands, her smile freezing on her face in a glare of warning. “You are both going into that house, and you are going to talk to _each other_ about this, or so help me God, I will turn this problem over to Mazelinka.” She lightly pressed her fingertips on the console. “Do you _want_ me to turn this problem over to Mazelinka?”

Vissenta shook her head violently, and out of the corner of her eye, she could see Julian’s tousled auburn curls shaking about as he did the same. She reached for the door handle. “Loud and clear, Portia.”

“Absolutely,” Julian agreed.

Without a second glance to look back, the two of them clambered out of the Jag and up onto the porch. Vissenta fumbled for her keys, dropping them with a string of muttered curses, and above her, Julian used the spare set to unlock the door. They stared at one another for a moment, words hanging in the air, but a loud honk from Portia had them both jumping like they’d been poked with a cattle prod, and they hurried up the stairs.

* * *

Julian sat on the bed, and Vissenta sat on one of the bar stools. They sat there for a long time, staring at the floor, the opposite walls, their hands, their feet, at anything but each other, when Vissenta finally broke the silence. “I’m sorry, Ilya.”

She could hardly bear to look at Julian to see his reaction to these words, but she did it anyway, forced herself to look at the way he covered his face with his hands and peeked up at her through his fingers, and she wanted to… She wanted to be closer to him, but she didn’t feel like she had permission, didn’t feel like she could do that just yet, and so she kept talking.

“You said you wanted a friend,” she continued.

He looked so _pained_ at those words. Was she doing this wrong? Was she saying the wrong thing? Wasn’t friendship a good thing? Wasn’t that the way this went?

She took a deep breath. “I want us to be friends. I want us to always be friends. I want…” She twisted her fingers together, and while staring at her hands, her gaze wandered to the tattoo on her forearm. She rubbed at the outline of the heart, the three knives, the symbol she’d latched onto as soon as she was discharged from the hospital and spent days on that attic bed in Mazelinka’s house with a tarot deck she’d uncovered in a box up there.

She managed to look up again, and once she did, she found that she kept staring at Julian. She stared at the way one of his shoulders slouched ever so slightly lower than the other, giving him the permanent look of an insouciant shrug, even now. Her eyes traced the hunch of those shoulders, the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt, the fine red hair dusting his freckled arms, the way he rubbed the fingertips of his right hand along the knuckles of his left. She finally managed to meet his eyes, meet those storm-gray irises that looked up at her with so much longing and sorrow and apology and… something else. There was something else.

She knew what it was.

She knew there was a name for it.

She hoped she could look at him the same way. She could only hope that all of this… this _emotion_ surging in her chest could reach her own gaze.

Julian looked as if he was ready to sigh, or cry, or lay down and give up, and Vissenta barreled forward to keep him from any of those things, to try and make him _understand,_ because the look in her eyes must not have done enough. “I got this tattoo because I thought I was built to suffer. That’s it. Just built to grind through all the pain and… and the _grief_ …” She swallowed the lump that rose in her throat. “I’ve never thought I deserved something as big as…” She caught on the word. She couldn’t say it. Why couldn’t she say it?

Julian heaved a sigh. “It seems we do have a lot in common after all, eh?” He ran his fingers through his hair, and Vissenta wanted to do it for him, and she wanted to watch him do it, and good God, she wanted to _always_ watch him do it, but she was still frozen to her spot on the stool, she still didn’t think she was allowed to get up and move forward and touch those hands and that face, not yet…

Julian continued. “What you wanted… you wanted a friend. And I failed miserably on that account.” He really did look as if he might cry now, and his voice was wavering, and Vissenta felt her heart bleeding from the edges as if three knives were piercing it right through. “I haven’t been honest with you.” He met her eyes again. “Vissenta, I’ve been in love with you since you looked at me and told me I needed a haircut.”

In her own surprise, Vissenta let out a strangled sound that was halfway between a laugh and a sob. “You… I what?” She pressed her palms against her eyes, trying to keep from crying. “I did what?”

She could hear the sad smile in Julian’s voice. “You and Pasha, over your fall break your freshman year. You stayed with us a Mazelinka’s house.” He took a deep, shuddering breath, and Vissenta knew that if she looked at him she’d actually begin crying in earnest. “I came downstairs for dinner, and the way you looked at me over your shoulder and smiled…”

Vissenta snorted, still covering her face with her hands. “Really?”

“Really.” She could hear Julian shifting on the bed, but not standing up to come to her.

_He’s afraid, too._

His voice had grown a little steadier, a little warmer, but still wistful. “You looked at me and grinned and I noticed that you had one dimple and I think I would’ve swooned right into your lap, and then you said, ‘God, that ponytail is atrocious, should I cut it for you?’”

Vissenta’s laugh was sudden, shaking, and uncontrollable in the way it rolled from her, washed along by a wave of tears that came in this confused mess of _everything_. “I can’t believe you remember that. I don’t remember it at all.”

“I haven’t forgotten a single thing you’ve said to me since then.” Julian’s voice was so, so soft. “That’s just pathetic, isn’t it? I mean, desperately awful. Tragic. Downright—“

“Byronic,” Vissenta supplied.

“Exactly.”

Vissentacouldn’t hold back any longer. She wiped her face furiously on the sleeve of her t-shirt, probably leaving snot along the way, and stood to take the few steps to the bed. Even sitting down like this, Julian was tall enough that she was able to easily take his face in her hands, and she did so.

She had to.

It was now or never.

She took a deep breath. She had to do this right, she had to make sure he knew, she had to lay it all out, because she had to make absolutely certain this was the right choice and she had to make sure _he_ made the right choice. “When I said best friends, that one time—“

Julian took her wrists and gently guided her hands away from his face. “Friends,” he echoed softly. “I want that, but I don’t know if I _only_ want that, and it’s not fair of me to ask you—“

Vissenta sighed in exasperation and dropped to sit beside him, pulled on his shoulders to make him face her, took hold of his shirtfront and tugged him closer until his face was millimeters from hers, and they were so close, and—

“I love you too, Ilya,” she said.

They sat there for a moment, his eyes wide and hers steady and sure and unblinking, and finally he leaned back slightly. “What?”

Vissenta didn’t let go of him. “I know we’re both fucked-up people,” she said, trying her hardest to look into his eyes and not let her gaze wander down to his lips. “I know I need to get therapy. Shit, you could probably use some too.” She pursed her lips and furrowed her brows and looked down at her hands where she still had a hold of his shirt. “Just maybe not the same therapist. I think ethically that’s frowned upon.”

When she looked back up, Julian had gone from looking baffled to looking… _beatific_. He was smiling, so unabashedly, that her heart skipped a beat at the sight, and she wondered how she could keep making him smile like that.

He answered the question before she could ask. “I love you,” he said.

And it was her turn. “I love you too.”

He shook his head in wonder. “You said it again.”

Vissenta was torn between wanting to kick him in the shin and wanting to kiss the English-speaking ability right out of him again. “Of course I did,” she said instead. “I’ve been sitting here for fifteen minutes trying to tell you.”

He kissed her then. He kissed her hungrily, kissed her desperately and thankfully and gratefully, with his hands cupping either side of her face, and she was still holding on to his shirt and she couldn’t even form a thought coherent enough to _move_ her hands to do something different with them. Instead, she tilted her head, leaned in closer, gently ran the tip of her tongue along his lower lip and she felt him smile against her and oh.

_Oh._

She let go of his shirt, and rather than begin the frenzied dance of loosening buttons and tugging on zippers that was so often her modus operandi, she reached instead for his fingers, where they rested along the curve of her jaw just below her ear, and she stroked the knuckles, pressed her fingers until they were between his, and he reluctantly let go and he was still kissing her, he was still pressing his lips to hers so gently, and she simply laced her fingers in his and held on.

_Soothe the hurts._

She gently turned her head, felt him brush kisses into the corner of her mouth and along her cheek as she gently peppered his knuckles with kisses of her own, all so gentle, all so light and yet she knew that if he felt the way she did, the trail of kisses she left for him must feel the way his did along her cheek, bright and burning and as if they should leave a mark.

“It feels good,” she murmured.

“Hm?” Julian was still kissing her, now coming back to the center, now nearly ready to meet her lips with his own.

“Kissing someone you love,” Vissenta said, breathing the words out as he breathed her in.

* * *

They fell asleep still fully dressed.

It was, oddly, the most intimate night Vissenta had ever spent with another human being.

He saw her cry, and if she’d had any doubts that he might truly love her, that did a good deal to convince her otherwise, because she knew _exactly_ how she looked when she was sobbing. But turnabout was fair play, because he took this as license to cry too.

God, they both hurt so much.

“I’m never going to be good enough for you,” he said, at one point.

“Good thing,” she told him from the open bathroom, sniffling and splashing cold water on her face. “Because I’m sure as shit never gonna be good enough for you, either.”

He’d laughed at that. “Pasha was right, wasn’t she?”

Vissenta climbed back onto the mattress and buried her face in the crook of his shoulder, a place that felt as if her head might have been meant to rest there. _God, I’m getting sentimental._ “She usually is.”

When they woke to the sound of Julian’s alarm trilling insistently, they were both still so exhausted, still so wrung out, and Vissenta had cried so much she might as well have been hungover too. She handed Julian a mug full of ice water and a headache powder packet. “It’s disgusting, but I promise you’ll thank me later,” she told him.

“I’ll thank you now,” he said, tilting his head back and letting the stream of powder hit the back of his throat with a grimace. He gulped down nearly all of the water and rubbed his temples. “I wouldn’t trade last night for anything.”

Vissenta raised one eyebrow. “God, you really are a masochist, aren’t you?”

He leaned forward and kissed her cheek, smiling all the while. “Darling, you truly understand me.”

_Darling._

The word made her blush, made her heart race, made her suddenly aware that yes.

Yes.

She loved him.

She loved him today, and probably tomorrow, and they could love each other a day at a time, if that’s what it took.

She said it to him again, when he left, because he still had a job, after all. “I love you, Ilya.” She leaned against the doorframe, tried to act cool, tried to maintain at least some semblance of Vissenta Senadz, the badass star chef of Vesuvia, the woman who was crass and blunt and the definition of enfant terrible, but _goddamn_ , it was hard to keep that up when Julian was smiling at her like that.

He ducked his head to give her one last, lingering kiss. “Ya tebya lyublyu.”

Vissenta closed her eyes and smiled. “You’ll have to teach me that one.”

* * *

He did teach her, after dinner at Mazelinka’s, after Portia bid them farewell with a relieved smile and embrace and the gently whispered threat that if they ever, ever pulled this shit again, she was going to personally murder both of them.

The two of them went back to her place, walking in the cool evening, hands entwined, and Vissenta felt light. She felt so truly _light_ , as if for the time being, she could relax. She could even let go.

Because Julian was there to catch her, even if he fell down along the way.

On her bed, she slipped her hands into his. “What else were you saying?”

Julian ran his thumbs along her wrists. “How do you mean?”

Vissenta brought one of his hands up, planted a kiss on his palm. “The Russian stuff. It was more than just… ya tebya…”

“Ya tebya lyublyu,” he replied, slowly, gently, and Vissenta repeated it until she had it right. He flushed deep red. “It was poetry,” he mumbled, suddenly unable to meet her eyes.

Vissenta laughed, but when she saw his blush deepen, she backtracked. “I have a secret,” she told him.

“Oh?” Julian looked back up at her, a smile playing along the corners of his mouth.

She nodded. “It’s terrible. Awful. It could ruin my reputation if it got out.” She leaned forward conspiratorially. “I really… fucking… love… poetry.”

This time, Julian was the one who snorted as he laughed, and Vissenta was downright delighted at this new, strange, _intimate_ thing she was able to coax, because she had the feeling he didn’t do this around anyone else, and she treasured it. “Well then,” he said. “I can recite it for you, and maybe I’ll even translate it this time.”

Vissenta sat back, leaning on her palms, and was surprised and delighted when Julian leaned forward to rest his hands on her hips. “Ya pomnyu chudnoe mgnovene: peredo mnoi yavilas ty,” he began. “Kak mimolyotnoe videne, kak genii chistoi krasoty.”

Vissenta brushed a hand through the hair falling forward into his eyes. “And what does that mean,” she said softly, leaning back onto her elbows this time, her eyes beckoning him forward.

Julian leaned over her now, resting on his elbows, brushing his lips along her jaw to her ear. “ I still recall the wondrous moment, when you appeared before my sight, as though a brief and fleeting omen, pure phantom in enchanting light.”

With a laugh, Vissenta ran her hands along his shoulders. “I didn’t know you were so skilled at translation.”

“You could call me a cunning linguist,” Julian said, cocking an eyebrow. He ducked away from her swatting hand, now laughing himself. “I might have memorized this one in a few languages.”

Vissenta smirked. “I bet it’s a real panty-dropper.”

She sucked in a breath when she felt Julian’s hand on her hip once more, this time running his fingers along the waistband of her leggings. “Is it, now?”

Something switched in her mind, and the teasing was gone, the jokes and sarcasm and everything else she’d always put up, and she moved her hands from his shoulders to his face and looked into his eyes. “I love you,” she whispered.

Julian’s answering kiss left her breathless and dizzy, no longer the gentle press of lips they’d exchanged the night before. He _explored_ her. He brought both hands up to her face, his arms framing her head on the pillow, and he ran one thumb over the scar on her eyebrow as he opened his lips in an invitation, and she accepted, meeting his tongue with hers, and she could taste the coffee they’d drunk after dinner, and the merlot they’d drunk before, and something else about him, some other taste that she’d grown accustomed to and yet was discovering all over again, because it was just Julian. It was Ilya. It was _unique_ , and it was a taste she wanted all to herself.

Only when she guided one of his hands downward did he lower the rest of himself against her, and still he was patient, he held back, he waited for her guidance and her permission as he continued to kiss her. She slid one hand beneath the collar of his shirt. “Help me out of these clothes?”

Even though Vissenta was just in a t-shirt and leggings, Julian undressed her as slowly and reverently as if she’d been in a formal gown, running his hands along every inch of skin he exposed as if he were trying to memorize the feeling of every curve and dip and swell of her. She could feel her entire torso pebbling into gooseflesh even as heat flooded at the core of her, and she did her best to unbutton his shirt just as slowly, just as patiently, and it was agonizing and yet…

She didn’t want this to end.

She _wanted_ to explore him, as much as he did her.

She traced one finger down along his sternum, through the hair on his chest, and used both her hands to skate along the line of his ribs, and she pulled him closer to her, feeling his skin against hers.

When he slipped her bra straps from her shoulders and cupped her breasts in his hands, she thought she would burst into fireworks, into a thousand pieces, into something else entirely.

“I love you,” she whispered to him again.

“I love you,” he said to her, when their bodies were pressed flush, when the tip of him was pressed to her, and she pulled him toward her, into her, _with_ her.

She couldn’t say it enough.

She hoped they would never stop saying it.

“I love you,” she said, and it was a promise.

“I love you,” he said, and it was his vow.

_I love you._

_I love you._

_I love you._


	14. Show Me Devotion And Take Me All The Way

**_Two Years Later_ **

It had all begun at a wedding, and here they were again, all gathered in the name of celebrating love and union and one hell of a party.

Vissenta was pacing in the upstairs guest room at Portia and Nadia’s house, staring at her phone, shaking her head and gesturing wildly at a bemused-looking Portia. “I can’t believe Vincent is here!” She was ready to throw her phone out the window. “Why did Marcie think I needed to know this? Why isn’t she up _here_ yet?”

Portia shot Natiqa a Look. “She’s right. Could you drag Marcelie up here?” She leaned forward. “And talk to Nahara along the way.”

Vissenta was still pacing and muttering. “I can’t believe this. This is what happens when you throw a big party, Portia. My _father_ thinks he’s _entitled_ to just _show up_ —“

“And _Nahara_ is going to kindly _show him the way off the property_ ,” Portia interrupted. “Everything is going to be fine. Now sit down so I can finish your hair.”

Vissenta groaned, but she obeyed, plopping down as much as the layers of ruffled tulle of her tea-length skirt would allow. “I could run out of here right now,” she lamented. “We could elope. We still have time to elope.”

“I had to drive you here,” Portia said mildly through a mouth full of bobby pins as she began to brush Vissenta’s hair and separate it into strands to braid. “Because both of you are gays who can’t drive.”

“I could drive a golf cart,” Vissenta said. “I will steal a golf cart and we will drive all the way back home and none of you could stop us.”

“It would be the Bonnie and Clyde coup of the century,” Portia said, coiling a braid and pinning it into place along Vissenta’s crown. She slid sprays of baby’s breath into the plaits, and then moved to sit in a chair in front of Vissenta in order to start applying makeup. “The newspapers would have a field day.”

“I’m gonna do it,” Vissenta mumbled. “Gonna drive the golf cart all the way to the airport and we’re going to Vegas and you can’t stop us.” Still, she closed her eyes to let Portia dab at her lids with creamy gold shadow, even as she kept talking about all her plans to steal her fiancé and run off to get married by the worst Elvis impersonator they could find.

The door opened and in came Natiqa and Marcelie. “Nahara’s taken care of the problem,” Natiqa said cheerily. Vissenta could hear the clunk of an ice bucket landing on a table behind her, and the sound of a bottle being extricated and opened. “Mimosas?”

“There’s no orange juice,” said Marcelie dubiously.

“It’s my specialty,” Natiqa replied.

Vissenta twisted in her seat to look up at her older sister, ignoring Portia’s protests. “Can’t I just elope, Marcie? Didn’t you do that? You eloped. I could call this whole party off.”

“You will not, I spent too much time planning it,” Natiqa said as she began pouring champagne into a line of flutes. “At least let everyone stay and eat the food. I built that menu and wine selection myself and you will _not_ take this from me.”

Portia took Vissenta by the chin and turned her head back around, tube of lipstick in hand. She began to apply it to Vissenta’s lips, and with Vissenta’s mouth otherwise occupied and unable to protest, she gave her soon-to-be sister-in-law a grim smile of warning. “And if you rob me of the chance to see my brother cry like a little bitch at the sight of you in this dress, I will personally, slowly, and thoroughly dismember you.”

“Portia,” Vissenta whined. “If he cries, I’m gonna cry, and you just did my makeup! You don’t want me to ruin my makeup, do you?”

“Small price to pay.” Portia turned back to the vanity table, where Vissenta’s things were scattered about, and picked up Vissenta’s pill box. “I’ll let you pick your poison here, but you _will_ take something and you _will_ drink some champagne and you _will_ walk down those stairs and out to that lawn and get married to Ilya today, here, on this property, where all of us can see you.”

Vissenta obediently snapped a Xanax in half and chased it with sparkling wine. “I don’t know why everyone’s gotta be here to see it,” she grumbled.

“Because we love you,” Marcelie said, pulling up a chair and sitting across from her little sister. “And because we want to be happy _with_ you.”

“And because it’s going to be the second best party Vesuvia has ever seen,” Natiqa added.

Vissenta shot them both a pout. “What, I don’t get to have the best party?”

“Nope.” Portia tapped her glass against Vissenta’s and drained her champagne. “That honor will always belong to me.”

* * *

As Portia predicted, Julian did in fact start to cry the instant he saw Vissenta walk out onto the lawn. In spite of herself, Vissenta started to cry too.

Portia gleefully took as many pictures as she could manage.

Vissenta and Julian hardly listened to the words of the brief ceremony that Nasrin Satrinava read. They only barely managed to remember to repeat the vows. But they certainly didn’t forget the part where they were told to kiss. Julian lifted Vissenta up, and she shrieked and tried to kick him with her glitter-covered Docs, but then he caught her mouth with his and she wrapped her arms around his neck and, without a care for how many people were there to witness the marriage of the latest star in Vesuvia’s culinary constellation to the new darling of the Vesuvia University public health program, she opened her mouth and slipped him entirely more tongue than necessary. Even amid the whoops and cheers from the assembled crowd, he was all that mattered to her, and she was all that mattered to him, and for an instant, they were the only two people in the world.

When the spell was broken, they were at the center of one hell of a party. They were giddy, they were happy, they were _in love_ , and they allowed themselves to feel it without reservation.

The problem with being the center of attention, though, is that it made what they _truly_ wanted to do nearly impossible.

Vissenta thought she’d succeeded, briefly, when she dragged Julian around a tree at the edge of the lawn, the music and dancing of the reception keeping everyone else distracted enough. “Come here, husband,” she breathed, taking hold of his shirt collar and pulling his face down to hers.

“Mm, _wife_.” Julian looked like he _relished_ the word. He ran his hands along the boning of the strapless bodice of her dress. “I feel underdressed, next to you.”

“Well, you can undress me later,” Vissenta whispered. “But at least I’m in a skirt for now.” She caught his lower lip between her teeth, pulling a groan from the back of his throat, and then moved to kiss the spot where his jaw and neck and ear all met.

Julian’s hand slid lower and began to bunch up the layers of her dress, seeking a way beneath them. “It’s an awful lot of skirt,” he said against her neck. “I don’t know if I can find what I’m looking for.”

Vissenta wrapped her arms around his neck and lifted one thigh to hitch her leg around him, giving him better access to lift her up, and she braced herself against the tree behind her, only barely registering the rough scratch of the bark against the bare skin of her back. “Look harder,” she said.

When Julian’s hands found purchase on her upper thighs, she hummed with delight. When he moved one hand to stroke between them and gently tug aside the scrap of lace that just barely covered her, her hum turned to a gasp. “There it is,” he breathed in her ear, circling over her clit with one finger, and she twined her fingers in his hair and pulled his mouth to hers and they were soon both panting and flushed, and she whined when he stopped touching her but then she could hear the sound of his zipper sliding down and she grinned into his kiss and _yes, finally, finally—_

She felt something cool and dry and smoothly scaled slide across her right shoulder and she yelped. “Shit! Shit! Julian, put me down, _put me down_!”

Julian was hurriedly trying to wedge his erection back into his pants when Asra appeared. “Uh… Asra! What a… what a _nice_ and not at all _awkward_ surprise.”

Asra flashed them both a mischievous grin. “Have you two seen Faust anywhere?”

Vissenta felt the snake coiling around her shoulders, as if she was giving her a hug. “I think I found her.”

“Oh, wonderful.” Asra reached for Faust, who slithered up his sleeve, and gestured behind him with his head. “They’re starting toasts, and I would assume the bride and groom should be present for those.”

When he’d turned to go, Vissenta huffed. “All I wanted was a wedding night quickie,” she grumbled.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Julian said, picking a stray twig from the back of Vissenta’s braids. “You can have me any way you’d like soon enough.”

* * *

The party was still in full swing at midnight and showed no signs of stopping. Vissenta was not a patient woman, and all she could think about was Julian’s hands doing what they did best, and maybe her mouth leaving a trail of hickeys down his neck. They hadn’t done that for a while, and they were about to have an entire honeymoon to let them fade. She wanted to make him _moan_.

She was so preoccupied with the thought that, as the two of them tried to weave their way through the crowd to freshen their drinks, she stumbled and fell into the pool.

When she resurfaced, the entire party had apparently come to a screeching halt all around her. She wiped at her eyes and looked up to see Julian kneeling by the pool, his face caught somewhere between dismay and delight, as if he wasn’t sure how he should react.

With a grin, she reached forward. “Come on in! Water’s great.” And with that, she pulled him in with her.

They did have to get out of the pool at some point. While Julian was led to a sitting room upstairs - _a sitting room, who has those anymore?_ \- Vissenta followed Natiqa to the opposite end of the second floor to the guest room she’d dressed in, where she was peeled out of her dress and waterlogged boots and handed several large, fluffy towels and an even fluffier spa robe. “And here I thought my husband was the one who was supposed to get me out of this dress tonight,” she said with a rueful smile.

“Well.” Natiqa checked her omnipresent wristwatch. “Looks like there’s twenty minutes before you two have to bid your farewells and head off on you grand New Orleans honeymoon.” She raised her eyebrows at Vissenta. “You’re going to _enjoy_ yourself on your honeymoon, aren’t you?”

“Oh, come on, Tiqa.” Vissenta carefully unpinned her hair and began to towel dry the soaked strands. “Doing research for the Mathilde’s menu is the best way for me to enjoy myself.” At Natiqa’s pursed-lip glare, she sighed. “Okay. Fine. I’ll just spend the whole time drinking and fucking my husband.”

“That’s more like it.” Natiqa poked her head out the door before stepping out. “No one else is up here. I don’t think anyone would blame you for taking some time to… relax.” She turned to look over her shoulder. “You know. Just hang out up here, while I stand at the bottom of the stairs and make sure no one comes up to bother you.”

Vissenta laughed. “I owe you my _life_ , Tiqa.”

“Oh, I know.” Natiqa waved a hand. “See you downstairs.”

Vissenta counted to a hundred, then opened the door as quietly as she could manage. She bolted down the hallway to the sitting room and knocked. “Ilya,” she whispered.

Julian was at the door in an instant. He’d apparently already started getting dressed in dry clothes, but she’d interrupted him halfway through the job. “Vissenta?”

She shoved her way in and pushed the door closed behind her, locking it before whirling back around to press her hands on Julian’s bare chest. “We’ve got maybe fifteen minutes,” she said, pushing him backwards until his legs brushed up against a divan and he was sitting down on it in an instant. She climbed up to straddle his hips. “And this marriage needs consummating.”

“Mm, but… ah… Vissenta… darling…” Julian was on his back now, already gone boneless beneath her - well, not _entirely_ boneless - as she untied the belt of her robe. “Someone could _hear_.”

“Oh, let them,” Vissenta said, shrugging the fluffy white terrycloth from her shoulders. “If Portia’s gonna make me go through all of this, then I’m gonna defile her divan.”

Julianarched his back when she reached down to unbutton and unzip his pants and shift them downward. “This is not the first time you’ve come on to me while talking about revenge against family members,” he said. “I’m beginning to think it’s a secret fetish of yours.”

“Mm, maybe.” Vissenta leaned over to cover his mouth with hers and run her tongue along his, and she pulled his hands up to her chest and he was rolling her nipples between his fingers, pinching and stroking just the way she liked it, just the way he’d learned in the years they’d spent together.

Years.

_Years._

And they had more before them.

She pulled back, ever so slightly, leaving a light peck on Julian’s lips before she spoke once more. “What if I told you about my last act of spite against my father?”

Julian groaned. “Do you have to do that _now_?”

Vissenta tilted her head and smiled. “I just know we hadn’t talked too much about my name.”

Julian dropped his hands, all previous activity briefly forgotten. “I… I didn’t want to _push_ you on it, Vis, and I assumed—“

Vissenta ran her fingers through his hair. “Just call me Mrs. Julian Devorak.”

Julian frowned. “If this is something—“

Vissenta laid a finger on his lips. “Shush. Let me finish.” She gave him a light kiss on one cheek, then the other. “I love you so much, Ilya,” she began. “And yes, some of it is the fact that I want to give the Senadz name one giant middle finger, but most of it is…” She looked into his eyes. “Most of it is that I love you, and I’m yours for as long as you’ll have me.”

At this, Julian pulled her down into another kiss, running one hand along her spine and pulling her as close to him as possible. “Vis…”

She smiled against his lips. “Plus, you know I own your ass in every other way,” she teased. “It’s the least I could do.”

Julian laughed softly against her, his hands resting on the curve of her backside now. “Well, then, Mrs. Devorak,” he began. “Should I perform my marital duties?”

Vissenta sat up and looked down, at Julian laid out beneath her, his hair spread out on the cushion and his face flushed and eyes half-closed in bliss already, and at the way he bit his lip and grinned up at her, and she canted her hips in response. “Oh, please do.”

They moved in tandem now, in a dance so well-rehearsed that they should have found the steps boring, should have found it all so routine, but Vissenta could never find this boring. She would never tire of the way Julian gazed up at her, the way his eyes glazed over oh so slightly whenever she softly told him to touch her, when she asked him to use his hands, to use his tongue, to use his lips and his fingers and his cock to bring her to the shuddering peak of pleasure. She ran her nails down his chest when he was fully seated inside of her, and the moan he let out was so _delicious_ , a sound she would never tire of hearing, and she couldn’t help her own small gasps and cries when he brought those long, clever fingers of his up to stroke her where she needed it most. They were here, joined together, and she hoped that the sight he beheld was as beautiful as the one that filled her vision now. If the look in his eyes was any indication, it must have been.

“Ilya,” she breathed out, and she leaned forward, holding his face in her hands as he continued to rub those ever-tighter circles, and he was thrusting up into her now, and she pushed back against him, chasing the friction, chasing the heat and the feeling that coiled up in her like a spring, and she kissed him, she kissed him and he kissed her and he said the words that always, always left her undone.

“I love you,” he said, his breathing ragged now, and he kissed her again, and she was rocking against him and could feel the warmth spooling out and she was there, and not there, and she was seeing stars, and she was gasping out those same three words against his lips when she came. _I love you I love you I love you I love—_

With a strangled cry, Julian’s hips jerked and stuttered, and Vissenta held on to him fiercely, buried her fingers in his hair, clung to him and kept whispering those words because she never, ever wanted him to forget.

Not as long as they both should live.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so, so much for coming along on this journey. This story was clearly meant to be told, for how quickly I wrote it, and I cannot wait to tell more stories about Julian and Vissenta in this setting. But for the time being, enjoy this story that's already meant so much to me, and I hope it's one you come to again and again.
> 
> You can come see all my other Julian/Vissenta shenanigans on [tumblr](https://vissenta-senadz.tumblr.com/), including art and silly headcanons and other nonsense. If you'd like to support me on [ko-fi](https://ko-fi.com/ouiserboudreaux), that'd be cool of you too.


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